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Two years ago, Accenture began experimenting with social networking through , which are profile pages that include a profile picture, job title, skills, e-mail and calendar information, document libraries and a list of co-workers (dubbed "Colleague Tracker").

But the MySite profiles turned out to be more like a static roster and were limited in how much they can be customized, says Dana. What the company needed were official Accenture Groups where employees can become members and have a main site where they can share information about a certain industry or subject through wikis, microblogging, tagging and social bookmarking.

Accenture ultimately chose to integrate Newsgator's SocialSites suite into SharePoint 2007 to build on existing SharePoint social tools. After pilot testing the Newsgator suite from March 2009 until the end of August, Accenture flipped SocialSites into production mode this past September.

Accenture has been using Newsgator's SocialSites for both its Group pages and its People profile pages (MySites). The end result resembles Facebook's News Feed page.