Social Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are getting a lot of attention lately. Depending on where you work, these kinds of sites might not have a place in your corporate world. However its easy social networking concept can be utilized in a company environment.

The concept of connecting people with similar interests in social networking sites allows friends to connect and interact together with various common web applications, such as photo albums, blogs and forums. The same concept can be extended to employees within a company or organization, allowing them to connect co-workers working on various projects or goals and interact with each other online. But the most popular social networks aren’t necessarily the most appropriate places to share confidential corporate information. Windows SharePoint Services has been around for years, and can offer a number of the features you’ll find in these social networking tools as well as offering a more appropriate location to store sensitive company information.

You can create password protected sites with accounts for each employee. The employees can then customize their personal profile, organize themselves into groups, departments, workgroups, or project teams and then begin sharing. They can share and contribute using document libraries, blogs, forums, calendars, contact lists and even photo libraries. You can create sub-sites for specialized departments or teams with private versions of each application, customized for that group. There are even applications that allow you to create wikis, surveys and tasks. User and Group level permissions allow you to prevent access on various levels, ensuring that confidential information in one area is visible only to those who “need-to-know”.

And what about extending it further to customizable applications? There are some templates that have been pre-written, such as bug database, event planning, knowledge base, employee activities, new store opening, request for proposal, and even sports league. These are just a few examples, and this can be customized even further by the savvy administrator by creating a custom templates designed for a specific purpose, or even even custom web-parts and workflow elements within the template. You can also use SharePoint Designer to ever greater advantage of this powerful platform.

All of this can be especially useful if you have remote workers who you still want to contribute to or access to any of this information. And with a free 30 trial, why not try it out? All you need to get started are users that are ready to contribute.

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

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