E2.0 Amplify the Impact of Your People

Derek Burney, general manager of SharePoint Platform and Tools, on Microsoft's take on E2.0. We could not let a meeting pass without hearing from Microsoft, the 800 pound gorilla.

The role of software is to help you find the information you need to to do your job, to retain and share knowledge and build communities across organizational communities.

Microsoft thinks that collaboration tools should be available to knowledge workers where ever they are. Five core capabilities: (1) unified communications, (2) business intelligence - finding statistics and metrics about the enterprise, (3) enterprise content management - storing documents, (4) collaboration - wikis, blogs and what have you and (5) enterprise search.

They take collaboration: wikis, blogs, expertise search, rss feeds, social networking, profiles and presence in the working environment and structure to reduce complexity and security risks.

There are four types of people important to the business: (1) employees, (2) customers, (3) partners/supplier and (4) non-affiliated community. These four groups work in silos and information is not readily shared.

How can you improve this situation?:

• Promote expertise and communities in your organization.
  Right people, in the right place, at the right time. It does not rely on LDAP to create the community. Build a Mysite so there is a one stop shop for information on a person in the enterprise and a one stop shop for that person to find the information they need.
  
• Strengthen customer relationships.
  Use E2.0 to drive marketing, sales and customer support. Use the community for support and evangelism. Make more information available to your customers about your organization and build loyalty with them.
  
• Build next generation platforms.
  Avoid the results gap by making more information available to employees. Connect the office applications with the information silos in other enterprise background data. Integrate external data with internal data to supply more information to the knowledge workers. We pointed out the Popfly.com mashup tool that makes it easy to create mashups.
  
• Unify communications.
  Here he pitched LiveMeeting
  
• Accelerate development and innovation.
  Try leveraging your customers to get direction and ideas for development. They launched the community kit for SharePoint v2, includes enhanced blog, enhanced wiki and tag clouds. It creates innovation to the product outside of the development cycle.
  

Yes, this was a big sales pitch. But since we are a Microsoft shop, currently using SharePoint and upgrading to Sharepoint 2007, I paid attention to this sales pitch. He used screenshots and examples from the software we are implementing.