Social Computing In The Enterprise

Social Computing in the Enterprise Microsoft Vision for Business Leaders

Alina Fu • Christian Finn Daniel W. Rasmus • Rob Salkowitz June 2009 Microsoft Vision for Social Computing

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Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3 Business Drivers for Social Computing………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5 Share Tacit Knowledge…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5 Discover and Connect with Experts…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………7 Attract and Retain Talent…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………9 Drive Organizational Productivity…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………10

Microsoft Vision for Social Computing………………………………………………………………………………………………………………11 Context and Consistency for Information Workers………………………………………………………………………………………………12 Governance and Visibility for the Business……………………………………………………………………………………………………………13 Manageability and Integration for IT……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………14 Extensible and Customizable………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………15

Next Steps………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………16

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Introduction Since the early years of the 2000s, social computing has been one of the most innovative and dynamic trends on the Web. Blogs, wikis, social networks, micro-blogging, and other activities that engage people in collective activities via the Internet have challenged traditional business models, created new ecosystems of people and content, and fundamentally transformed the way people manage their personal and professional relationships. What Is Social Computing? Social computing is a term with many meanings. We refer to social computing as the natural evolution of collaboration: a shift from a focus on content to a focus on people. The power of social computing lies with the users and the communities. Organizations obtain business value from the experiences and ideas produced through the use of these collaboration technologies that are modeled after natural social behavior. The common term for such technologies on the Internet is Web 2.0, and, in the enterprise setting, Enterprise 2.0.

Social computing capabilities are critical in the new world of business and the global knowledge economy. Social networks are conduits for people to contribute the personal knowledge and talent that can differentiate firms from their competitors and marshal the resilience to adapt to unexpected events. As businesses become more complex, distributed, and dependent on input from customers, partners, and governments, social computing technology can facilitate conversations across time and distance, while preserving the authenticity of the individual voice and the spontaneity of unstructured communication. This builds the social capital that all businesses need to operate effectively. In addition to these generalized benefits, social computing supports strategic business goals and scenarios including: • Providing natural ways to capture and share tacit knowledge—critical to the continuity and competitiveness of businesses faced with the retirement of baby boomers during the next 10–15 years and the virtualization of organizations through outsourcing and telework. • Enabling people to find and engage experts inside and outside the organization, to generate ideas and facilitate the conversations that lead to rapid innovation. • Helping organizations attract and retain young talent, by providing people with a familiar infrastructure of collaborative and social media to effectively blend work and life priorities and be productive. • Increasing organizational productivity, providing managers with clear vision into team dynamics and giving knowledge workers easy, natural ways to share insights and collaborate. The success of social computing depends on adoption and utilization as much as, or more than, the underlying technology. Well-implemented social applications, in business or on the Web, share a few characteristics that enable them to take root and become self-sustaining:

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EASY to learn and use EMERGENT, enabling people to discover one another and form their own communities organically REWARDING, with social incentives (recognition, reputation) for creatingand discusising content PERSONAL , so people can customize how they represent themselves and how they interact with the network ENGAGING across multiple channels, devices, and media types for rich conversations SELF-REGULATING to the maximum feasible extent, but with bedrock policies to prevent abuse Any successful enterprise deployment of social computing should seek to replicate these attributes through a combination of the right technology investments and management practices that support them. The spread of vibrant communities of knowledge and practice can have dramatic qualitative impacts in a number of business scenarios, as described in the sections below. While good front-end design and capabilities are necessary factors to realize the benefits of social computing, they are not in themselves sufficient for the needs of enterprise customers. That’s because businesses have a number of legitimate concerns beyond the promotion of community and the collaborative creation of content, including: SECURITY, privacy, and compliance CUSTODY of data, relationships, and records IT GOVERNANCE and predictability PRESERVING VALUE of current and future investments ROBUST RELIABILITY AND SCALABILITY USABILITY across a workforce with varying levels of comfort with social computing PRODUCTIVITY and minimization of distractions for end-users Few consumer Web 2.0 products meet these criteria. They are not designed to. But one of the risks of having such appealing and accessible tools for collaboration and community flourishing outside the enterprise is that people who recognize the business applications of social computing will not wait for corporate IT to provide them.

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Some organizations have reacted to the uncertainties and risks of social networks by attempting to ban access to some of the more popular consumer sites like Facebook and Twitter, or impose strict policies around their use. While this may address some short-term issues, it is not a sustainable strategy if large segments of the workforce, partners, or customers are determined to use social computing technologies for communication, collaboration, and conversation. Refusing to embrace the benefits of social computing within the enterprise framework is how companies end up with more and better information about their workforce posted on external social networking sites such as LinkedIn—where it is visible to everyone, including competitors—than is available from their internal company directory. It is how an industry group might find itself held hostage to the policies of an external social network that suddenly decides to revoke a critical service or change its policies after the organization spent months publicizing and assembling a community. It’s why businesses that have found value in micro-blogging tolerate the “Fail Whale” when Twitter is over capacity.

The Microsoft vision for social

computing in the enterprise balances

the transformative benefits of knowledge

sharing and relationships with sound IT

and business principles. There is a better path for enterprises looking to harness the power of social computing and avoid the significant risks of adopting consumer-grade technology. The Microsoft vision for social computing in the enterprise balances the transformative benefits of knowledge sharing and relationships with sound IT and business principles.

Business Drivers for Social Computing The following scenarios demonstrate some of the ways that social computing can address core business challenges driven by the dynamics of the new world of business. Share Tacit Knowledge Tacit knowledge comes from the on-the-job experience and outside knowledge that people bring to their work. As such, it is rarely documented and requires employees to contribute discretionary effort to share and transfer it. This tacit knowledge is a crucial input into training and continued learning as well as for building a knowledge base that can be accessed by employees at the moment they need it, whether working on a project or engaging with a customer. For many organizations, it is their competitive advantage—and it is at significant risk of being lost when employees leave or change roles.

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The need to retain tacit knowledge is particularly important considering the changes that are taking place in the global workforce. Due to declining birthrates in most of the developed world, skills and talent will be at a premium as experienced and knowledgeable older workers step away from full-time employment, with far fewer skilled replacements in the pipeline behind them. Many industries including telecommunications, insurance, nursing, civil service, skilled manufacturing, and aerospace are expected to be hit hard by this talent shortage. Transferring knowledge from older workers to their less experienced colleagues is critical for organizations to maintain capabilities and continuity. According to a 2006 Accenture study1, the most commonly cited impediments to better knowledge capture and sharing were lack of a common business culture across different locations (38 percent), no knowledge support infrastructure with dedicated people (37 percent), and the fact that knowledge sharing typically is not rewarded in the organization (32 percent). Traditional methods of knowledge transfer, from documentation to classroom training to structured knowledgemanagement systems and e-learning, provide one set of possibilities for organizations, but they are burdensome to both the knowledge bearers and the recipients, and have not been a ringing success in most organizations that have attempted them. Social computing alone can’t solve the knowledge-transfer problem, but it offers more flexible and convenient ways to capture the tacit knowledge of experienced workers in formats that are easy and familiar for young workers to consume. Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer can also provide cost savings and improved outcomes compared to structured, centrally managed training programs. Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, and other rich media allow knowledge owners to share what they know in an accessible, informal style with the people who need it. The key is to support a robust technology platform with strong business processes and a well-developed adoption strategy. Clearly, the need to capture and share knowledge is especially critical for a knowledge-intensive company like Microsoft, which employs more than 90,000 people worldwide. The company has created an internal podcasting system called Academy Mobile to share tacit knowledge through brief audio clips and conversations. The field sales force, in particular, is able to download podcasts to their mobile devices, which allows them to receive executive communications as well as information about new technology and training from subject matter experts while they are on the go. The Academy Mobile team has embraced a number of strategies to encourage experts to contribute knowledge through podcasts. They make the equipment available to any employee willing to record three podcasts per month, and provide extensive online help, best practices, and how-to guides on everything from good lighting techniques to tips for making content more interesting. The team also encourages originality in both content and delivery: one of their own promotional clips is in the form of a music video, for example. Microsoft offers “reward points”—redeemable for items such as Microsoft® Zune® digital media players and netbook computers—for the 1 The Accenture High Performance Workforce Study 2006 www.accenture.com/Global/Consulting/Workforce_Performance/R_and_I/HighPerformaceStudy2006.htm

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most prolific and highly rated podcasters, but discovered that many experts preferred to use their points to “buy” advertising for their podcasts on the Academy Mobile home page. Within the culture of Microsoft, reputation for knowledge is more valuable than stuff, so the business process and adoption strategy was molded to fit the organization’s values. The Challenge of Knowledge Capture and Sharing Almost half of surveyed executives said knowledge capture and sharing is a significant challenge. (% of respondents indicating the level of challenge on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “not a challenge” and 5 being “a severe challenge”)

39% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

28%

14%

14%

4%

1

2

3

1=Not a challenge

4

5

Severe challenge=5

Source: The Accenture High Performance Workforce Study 2006

Employees who create podcasts have profiles on Academy Mobile, and users can see the social feedback given to a podcaster including ratings, number of podcasts created, and number of podcasts downloaded. Though hard metrics are difficult to come by for all social media, Microsoft has documented several cases of knowledge distributed via Academy Mobile podcasts leading directly to the closing of multi-million-dollar sales opportunities. In addition to podcasts, Microsoft also allows employees to create personal blogs, which they use to capture and share their knowledge and experiences at Microsoft. The Microsoft SharePoint® Team blog, for example, allows team members to provide expert information via guest blog entries that may be used as resource material by others tracking related interests. Discover and Connect with Experts Today, there are fewer and fewer large companies whose employees are all located in the same building, city, or even country. Remote access, mobile devices, virtual communities, and other technology-mediated environments are driving the decentralization of organizations and workplaces. Outsourcing, offshoring, contingent staffing, and evolving models of employee engagement are also driving decentralization.

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From the perspective of the workforce, the demand for greater work/life balance is spurring a demand by employees to work from home more frequently. According to the Gartner Group, there will be 46.6 million teleworkers worldwide by the end of 2011.2 So how can organizations unite this virtual workforce and promote the kinds of informal interactions between people with different frameworks of knowledge and expertise that lead to great ideas? One of the key challenges facing companies with a geographically distributed workforce is reducing virtual distance, facilitating well-managed teamwork, and bringing partners into critical processes. This is especially critical for companies who use open innovation processes that combine internal and external ideas and resources to shape new business models. Expertise-location systems can help reduce virtual distance by making it easier for employees to find data and documents and to initiate relationships with the right people if the documents and discussion archives are not enough. Social networks, such as those offered by Facebook and LinkedIn, enable people to create durable structures to support relationships, maintain contact, keep one another up to date, and facilitate in-person meetings when appropriate. However, as public networks, they do not give large enterprises control or confidentiality over internal processes.

The ability to find the right expert

within Accenture People reduces the

time it takes to locate knowledge

and solve problems.

The global consulting firm Accenture has found a better solution. Accenture has 175,000 employees who are distributed globally and who primarily work remotely or travel often. To enable Accenture employees to leverage the knowledge, experience, and skills of others working in the company in the most effective and efficient manner possible, they created the Accenture People social networking solution on their intranet portal. The solution, which is built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, uses My Site profiles and personal sites as well as people/expertise search. Because the majority of Accenture’s employees work remotely and may have never met their coworkers, it can be very challenging to find the right subject matter expert within the organization to help with a specific business problem. The ability to find the right expert within Accenture People reduces the time it takes to locate knowledge and solve problems. For instance, one employee looking for a subject matter expert to help with an issue sent an 2 Gartner, Inc. “Dataquest Insight: Teleworking, The Quiet Revolution (2007 Update)” by Caroline Jones, May 14, 2007

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e-mail to all the people he could think of. It took two days for him to get to the right person. It took him only 15 minutes using People Search to find the expert he needed. What’s more, the results were sorted by social distance so he could determine how many degrees of separation he has in relationship to the other person. This is useful, for instance, if the user wants to ask a mutual acquaintance to facilitate an introduction with the other person. Attract and Retain Talent The workplace of the 2010s will be one of unprecedented generational diversity. The youngest cohort in today’s workplace—and the ones businesses need most to replace retiring baby boomers—is the Millennial generation (b. 1981–2000). These digital natives grew up with computers, video games, and the Internet. Their relationship with technology provides them with not only useful skills but also a fundamentally networked view of organizations and a more informal approach to boundaries and relationships. Millennials at work are not passive consumers of the technology that IT departments provide. A 2008 study by Symantec showed that younger workers are many times more likely to access social networks at work, use outside instant messaging services, download software to their business PCs, and other risky behaviors. Sixty-nine percent said they used whatever technology they wanted to at work, and only 45 percent said they “always adhered to IT policies,” compared with 70 percent of older workers.3 Employers that take a hard line on enforcing policies can win short-term battles over IT control and management, but risk losing the long-term war to recruit and retain nextgeneration talent that knows the value of social computing, both in their personal lives and at work. To help Millennials reach their full potential, companies need to find ways to support their networked learning styles. This means giving them access to people and data in context, at the moment when they need the knowledge to make a difference in an operational process or customer engagement. Electronic Arts (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is a global leader in interactive entertainment software. The majority of their customers and employees are part of the Millennial and Generation X demographics (age 25–40), so they tend to be heavy users of social computing in their personal and professional lives. To better enable their employees to achieve a healthy balance between their personal and professional lives (a core job satisfaction criteria for Millennials), Electronic Arts created EA People, an internal social networking site built on the SharePoint My Site, which provides the familiar features of a Web 2.0 social network within the umbrella of the enterprise. Employees can customize their own site by selecting one of the master templates that reflect EA’s major games and by adding SharePoint Web Parts like photo libraries. There is even a Facebook Web Part that uses Facebook’s Web API to enable secure interchange with the outside system. EA employees tend to work mostly with people from their team, so it can be challenging for a developer to find other developers on different teams to help with a problem. Because everyone on EA People has a My Site, it is faster and easier for employees to find the right resource exactly when they need it.

3 http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9075278

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EA also recognizes the importance of recognition to these new Millennials and created a Web Part to aggregate all the contributions the user has made on articles and blogs so employees can get recognition for their contributions. This aids in the motivation and retention of a productive group of workers who values the opportunity to express themselves and make an impact at work using the technologies they know from their outside lives. Drive Organizational Productivity In a challenging economic climate, all organizations are looking for ways to improve productivity, streamline processes, save costs, and outperform competitors. One key to achieving that is keeping people and teams across the breadth of the organization (including partners, vendors, outside resources, and potential customers) on the same page to promote common goals and avoid duplication of effort. What makes managing virtual teams particularly challenging is that team membership tends to be fluid and can include people from outside the organization. Virtual teams form and reform often, and can have multiple reporting relationships at different times. And when teams are loosely organized and distributed across multiple geographies, visibility into data and processes becomes even more critical. This complexity makes it difficult to apply traditional structured project management and collaboration solutions. Social computing can help optimize the performance of teams by adding a dimension of unstructured collaboration. This provides a forum for cross-disciplinary dialogs and authentic, spontaneous conversations between people in previously isolated areas of the company that can expose best practices—and call attention to inefficiencies and duplication—more rapidly. Executives understand the value this adds. According to a survey by The Economist, C-level executives see Web 2.0 as transformative for all parts of the business and more and more of them are investing in technologies for realtime communication, team/individual workflows, self-provisioning team workspaces, wikis, and enterprise e-mail that supports information rights management. VTB 24, a leading Russian bank with more than 10,000 employees spread across multiple business locations, wanted to establish an internal communication portal where employees could publish and access information quickly and easily. Additionally, they wanted employees to feel more involved in the organization and felt that this could be accomplished through sharing information on activities across the business. Thanks to a new SharePoint-based intranet site, employees can now access a centralized portal from any of the bank’s business locations. Employees can view comprehensive details on company structure, read bank news, see

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what colleagues are writing in forums, and feel more connected with each other. Departments can share success and best practices across the business, improving overall efficiency. The portal builds relationships, creates a stronger corporate culture, and, ultimately, leads to improved operational efficiency throughout the organization. CXOs Optimistic About Web 2.0 According to a survey of 406 C-level executives worldwide:

See Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase revenue and/or margins

85%

Believe Web 2.0 will have a significant impact on the companies business model

41%

See Web 2.0 as transformative for all parts of the business

35%

0%

10% 20%

30%

40%

50% 60%

70% 80%

90%

Source: The Economist, 2007

Microsoft Vision for Social Computing The Microsoft vision for social computing is to enable the full range of spontaneous, collaborative conversations around ideas, data, documents, and projects, while maintaining the necessary framework of business management and IT governance. This vision is based on four pillars: Context and consistency for information workers Governance and visibility for the business Manageability and integration for IT Extensibility and scalability for the future

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Context and Consistency for Information Workers Information workers already have plenty of ways to communicate, access information, and interact with business systems. In such a data-rich environment, where “information overload” can be the greatest problem, social computing has little value if it is just one more distraction requiring people to shift focus from the task at hand to use “yet another tool.” While consumer Web 2.0 applications are intended to distract and entertain, social computing in business functions best when the tools that people use to engage in conversations, post to blogs, collaboratively edit documents in wikis or workspaces, and consume or manage online content, are well-integrated into the software applications they already use for other work activities. Having a “save to workspace” or “publish to blog” item in the file menu of Microsoft Office Word or Microsoft Office Excel®, for example, may seem like a simple feature, but it enables a continuous work process rather than forcing people to save, change context, open another application, and then collaborate. Adding social computing capabilities into SharePoint workspaces by enabling blogs, wikis, interactive polling and rating, RSS, and other features is not merely a point of IT architecture, but a deliberate effort to simplify and contextualize an increasingly complex set of capabilities for a workforce already overwhelmed by new data, new demands for productivity, and new business challenges.

…the success of social computing

depends on participation , not technology.

This is an important point in the conversation between business and IT decision-makers within the organization. There are social computing products on the market that offer innovative, “bestof-breed” capabilities for specific usage scenarios. However, each new system and new set of practices adds costs and complexity to IT and user adoption and raises the entry costs of participation for individual workers. Microsoft prioritizes the integrated nature of the user experience in the design of its social computing solutions. By making social collaboration fluid and natural for people familiar with the basic information productivity software environment, businesses reduce the disruptive friction of implementing new processes, and therefore reduce the risks of failure due to poor user adoption. Achieving this kind of integration and consistency is critical in workplaces where people have varying degrees of comfort and familiarity with the tools and practices of social computing. When Web 2.0 applications first appeared in the early 2000s, the first adopters were typically members of the Millennial generation who grew up alongside the Internet and comfortably embrace its rapid innovations. Lately the demographics around utilization

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of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and online communities have started to skew older, meaning that more baby boomers and GenXers are starting to use social computing outside work. That’s good news in terms of paving the way toward enterprise adoption, but managers should be aware that the shift in usage patterns does not necessarily mean that the different generations use these tools the same way or place the same value on collaboration. Providing a consistent experience that places work-based social collaboration in the same context as other workcentered information activities can help keep older and younger workers with different levels of experience and expectations in sync. The bottom line is that the success of social computing depends on participation, not technology. The purpose of social computing in the enterprise is to increase the quality of content available online and encourage large numbers of people—not just cliques and experts—to engage in productive conversations around work practices. “Best-of-breed solutions” that are appropriate to small organizations with uniformly sophisticated user bases may not provide the same value to large, diverse, and dynamic organizations where people with business knowledge and experience are more focused on their deep subject-matter expertise than on learning new software. Governance and Visibility for the Business The open nature of social computing has led some to believe it is purely social, where productive conversations mix indiscriminately with chatter, gossip, and other discourse inappropriate to business. That objection, of course, applies equally to all human conversation, whether it takes place across an information network or around a water cooler. Social networks reflect the culture that surrounds them. The practices necessary to channel social and collaborative technologies into business value are the same practices any organization uses to promote professional conduct. Smart organizations already know how to do this, and they know how to listen and learn even from unruly voices. Social computing, deployed with proper governance, amplifies the impact of productive conversations and enhances the ability of management to learn from its people. It can also amplify risk. Social networks provide visibility and persistence to conversations that were once discrete and ephemeral. Some young people who enthusiastically shared (or over-shared) personal stories and photos on public social networks are finding out the hard way how certain content can affect their reputations. Organizations, especially companies in regulated industries, are understandably concerned that information casually shared in a conversation thread or a comment to a blog post becomes part of the company’s documentary archive, subject to audit and legal discovery. The Microsoft approach to social computing helps organizations and individuals balance transparency and privacy by providing personal and enterprise-level security settings around access and visibility of data. Owners of content can designate readers, editors, and content managers, grant or revoke access to sites individually or by group/ organizational role, open and close comment threads, enable or disable content ratings, make only certain content

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viewable, and enact other fine-grained controls to reduce the problems of spreading information further and wider than policy allows. In terms of content, individuals still need to rely on their own good judgment about what to share and how to express themselves, just as they must do in e-mail and other communications media. Enforcing those policies is a matter of management, not technology—although technology can help identify areas of concern before they become problems. Microsoft social computing technologies, as components of the business productivity architecture that extends from the data center to the desktop, reflect and inherit the core security features inherent in the Windows® platform. Manageability and Integration for IT One of the biggest drivers for the adoption of social computing in the enterprise is grass-roots demand. Typically a team or business group will begin using a new social collaboration technology to solve a tactical problem and adoption will spread as new users find their own business value in the tool. This is great for the business when it happens—and a nightmare for IT.

Microsoft has implemented social

computing as part of an integrated business productivity platform…

IT departments are already crunched for resources and personnel. Stand-alone social computing applications—even those designed for enterprise use—add new layers of complexity to datacenter management, security, systems performance, and user support. Microsoft has implemented social computing as part of an integrated business productivity platform, not a separate silo of applications and servers disconnected from other data center technologies. From the perspective of the user, this means that social capabilities appear in the context of familiar environments such as SharePoint workspaces, Microsoft Office system applications, and desktop gadgets. From the IT perspective, it means that they can be managed using the same administration tools and IT skills as the Microsoft back-office products the organization already owns, including Windows Server®, Active Directory® directory service, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Office Communications Server, and Microsoft Exchange Server. Because the functionality is embedded in the platform, it takes much less IT time and effort to say yes when business users demand social computing.

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Extensible and Customizable One clear trend in the development of social computing is that new applications will continue to emerge unexpectedly—some with obvious business value, and some that require ingenuity to apply to the business environment. Services delivered on the consumer Web will come and go, or change their terms and features based on factors beyond the control of even large enterprises that use them as substitutes for internal systems. Vendors in the enterprise space with compelling social computing offerings may run short of capital, be acquired, or simply end support for older products, leaving early adopters high and dry. Most businesses cannot afford to live at the bleeding edge of new technology. Enterprises seeking the benefits of social computing to support knowledge transfer, organizational productivity, or other compelling scenarios should look for a platform that is extensible by design, with a roadmap of future enhancements, developed and supported by a credible industry leader with global reach. The Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server are designed as application-development platforms using common developer tools and techniques to reduce the costs and delivery time of custom applications and integration. The underlying technologies can be designed and configured in new ways to support changing business requirements, and to mirror developments in the consumer social Web within the enterprise as business needs evolve. The applications themselves are designed to allow individual users to personalize and customize their own experience without technical programming skills. Business groups can deploy and manage social environments such as blogs, wikis, forums, communities, and rich content services without the need for IT resources or support, as quickly as required by a fast-changing business. People can manage their own privacy and sharing settings to balance transparency, professional work conduct, and personal expression in ways appropriate to their individual workstyle and organizational culture. For more extensive integration, customers have access to a global ecosystem of partners and developers who can extend and customize social computing solutions to meet specific needs, and integrate capabilities from other business systems and platforms into the SharePoint environment to ensure a consistent experience for information workers. Microsoft delivers social computing technologies through core products in our enterprise software portfolio, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, the Microsoft Office system, and Windows Server. Continuous investment in the future of these platforms is central to the Microsoft mission and business strategy. Input from customers on both the enterprise and consumer sides of the global Microsoft business inform the product roadmap for social computing, ensuring that capabilities constantly evolve to meet the needs of information workers, business leaders, IT managers, and consumers.

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Next Steps This white paper is intended to present a strategic business vision around social computing. For additional information on specific product capabilities and business scenarios, see “Get the Most Value from Social Computing” and other resources at www.sharepoint.microsoft.com/socialpoint. For readers interested in more detailed treatments of the broader themes discussed in this paper, look for titles in the Microsoft Executive Leadership series, including Listening to the Future: Why It’s Everyone’s Business; Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap; Uniting the Virtual Workforce; and Drive Business Performance, all published by John Wiley & Sons. To discuss any of these issues in the context of your own business needs and technology strategy, please contact your Microsoft Account Manager.

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The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This article is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. ©2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft and the Microsoft logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Microsoft Corporation • One Microsoft Way • Redmond, WA 98052-6399 • USA This document contains information of a proprietary nature. All information contained herein shall be kept in confidence and shall be for the original recipient’s use only. Any unauthorized reproduction by any other party shall constitute an infringement of copyright.

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