The Newsgator suite outshines SharePoint's marginal social tools, notes Dana, with features including microblogging, status updates, social bookmarking, tagging, activity feeds and information such as alerts for peoples' birthdays. Dana was also able to customize individual blog posts using Newsgator so they can be tagged to a certain group, and the posts are then aggregated on the group page. This prevents users from having to go to a group page to blog.

In January, the SocialSites pages within Accenture's SharePoint platform had 37,000 unique visitors and 86,000 visits.

Why did Accenture choose Newsgator over other social software vendors? Dana says he likes that Newsgator is designed to integrate on top of SharePoint rather than off to the side.

"What makes enterprise social networking valuable is when it lets you integrate with business processes," he says, "and Newsgator is architected to do that."