NewsGator adds employee learning module to Social Sites

09.10.2012
NewsGator on Tuesday a new employee learning module for Social Sites, its flagship enterprise social networking add on for Microsoft SharePoint.

The new module, called Enrich, lets users turn posts in their activity stream into knowledge base articles and post interactive instructional videos.

The knowledge base feature allows any user to flag a valuable activity-stream interaction with their peers and turn the exchange into a separate article that gets preserved for the benefit of others in the organization. Users can edit the exchange and add metadata to it. The exchange can involve not just text interactions but also Web pages, entire documents, microblogging posts and other elements.

Meanwhile, the video functionality lets users post instructional clips for fellow employees and open them up for group interaction via comments, ratings, polls and other enterprise social features. The videos can be broadcast to users' activity streams. To use this feature, customers need to have the optional Social Sites Video Stream component, a video upload and sharing product that NewsGator describes as an "enterprise YouTube."

The goal of Enrich is to make it easier and more convenient for users to create and collaborate on knowledge base articles and instructional videos by bringing them closer in context to people's daily workflows, said Melissa Risteff, NewsGator vice president of marketing and alliances.

"The way people work is changing. The knowledge worker is becoming an interaction worker," she said. "We're giving them contextual collaboration systems."