Contact Information: Media Contacts: For Awareness Jennifer Gazin or Virginia Zimpel 415.625.8555 awareness(at)launchsquad(dot)com Or: Eric Schurr 781-622-2388 eric.schurr(at)awarenessnetworks(dot)com
Awareness Unveils Integration With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Awareness Works With Microsoft to Enable Microsoft Users to Engage With Customer-Facing Web 2.0 Communities Within Microsoft Office SharePoint Products and Technologies
| Source: Awareness, Inc.
WALTHAM, MA--(Marketwire - June 9, 2008) - Highlighting one of the major features of its
Summer 2008 release, Awareness,
Inc. today unveiled platform
integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This integration, developed by working
with Microsoft, brings the value of social media to Microsoft
Office SharePoint Products and Technologies and enables users to
directly engage with Awareness-powered, external-facing Web 2.0
communities.
Increasingly, many companies are turning to social
media as a means to participate in more transparent conversations with
customers, prospects, and partners. The scalable and searchable backend of
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 -- ideal for broad information-sharing within an enterprise --
combined with Awareness' expertise in powering social
media communities, gives companies an effective way to tie their
internal collaboration closely to their external Web communities.
This strategic relationship between Awareness and Microsoft is valuable for
users that "live" in Microsoft Office SharePoint Products and Technologies
and need to engage with groups outside the enterprise, such as customers,
partners, prospects, etc. By integrating internal-facing environments with
social networking participation points from external-facing Web 2.0
communities, it becomes much easier to pull valuable information into the
enterprise where people can use it.
"This integration with Awareness communities extends the value of Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
3.0, allowing users to work in a much more social and collaborative way,"
said Deb Bannon, senior product manager for Microsoft's SharePoint Server
Partner Group. "Companies are increasingly seeking to combine their
internal collaboration with customer-facing social media and social
networking and this strategic relationship with Awareness will allow them
to do just that."
As part of its broader widget strategy and integration with other third
party offerings such as Facebook, Awareness has packaged its
inventory of Web 2.0 widgets to operate as web parts. When Awareness
creates a Web 2.0 community for an organization, it can provide the
SharePoint Products and Technologies administrators with a set of
customizable web parts that they can add to their sites. These web parts
allow users to monitor community content (e.g., recent posts, most popular
posts), contribute content (e.g., create a post, start or edit a wiki,
start or respond to a discussion, etc.), display user details and status,
search content, and monitor community participation metrics directly from
within SharePoint Products and Technologies.
The integration makes possible the following features within Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
3.0:
-- Dashboard of Awareness community activity;
-- Integration with Microsoft identity management (Single Sign-On) allows
for a seamless user experience;
-- Integrated search of SharePoint Products and Technologies and Awareness
content;
-- Access to Awareness community social
networking functionalities, including people lists, updateable and
customizable status and profile; and
-- Enhanced user-generated content functionality, including voting and
commenting on content.
"Our work with Microsoft extends the options for our customers to broadly
gather, organize, and distribute content through the power of social
media," said John Bruce, CEO, Awareness. "Now organizations can integrate
their Awareness-powered Web 2.0 communities with SharePoint Products and
Technologies, Facebook, and literally any website through our widgets and
APIs. This integration is a natural step in extending the use of our
platform into another environment to further facilitate and enhance social
media for the enterprise."
About Awareness
Awareness helps companies build and operate branded Web 2.0 communities.
These online communities let customers, prospects, employees and partners
connect with each other and share content. At the core of the Awareness
solution is an on-demand social media platform that combines the full range
of Web 2.0 technologies -- blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social
networking, podcasts, RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, etc. -- with
security, control, and content moderation. Awareness builds these features
into complete communities for companies, or customers use the Awareness API
and widgets to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their own web
properties. Major corporations such as McDonald's, Kodak, the New York
Times Company, Northwestern Mutual and Procter & Gamble use Awareness to
build brand loyalty, generate revenue, drive new forms of marketing,
improve collaboration, encourage knowledge-sharing and build a "corporate
memory." Find out more at http://www.awarenessnetworks.com.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered
owners.