Earlier this week I re-emphasized the importance of a social everywhere strategy to accelerate adoption of social media in the workplace. I strongly believe that this is critical as I live this day in and day out. I've shared the story before that the main reason I use social software at work is because our platform adjusts to my needs and not the other way around. The tool simply integrates into my daily life and I don't have to do anything different to use it.
There have been many articles posted that highlight how to socialize the different Microsoft solutions such as SharePoint, and its Office stack. This is a stack that is very prominent at many organizations and many users are familiar with these tools. Therefore, as a business starts their transformation to become a social business, why should they focus on a new way of collaborating, or a building yet another silo of information. Instead, companies who want to become a social business should make their existing business apps social, not just deploy a new web site and move everything into that, essentially building another silo.
In the last week, IBM Connections has been positioned as a Leader in both the Forrester Wave and Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Today, 3 new videos showed up on YouTube highlighting how to socialize Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint using IBM Connections. (it's really one video split into 3 because of YouTube's time limits). This should give everyone a good idea of what the social plugins do in the Microsoft stack. And the best part? The plugins are completely free and available for download from IBM's App Catalog.
What do you think?