NewsGator Technologies, Inc. unveiled the latest version of its Social Sites social business platform that lets people work the way they like while staying better engaged in the important conversations coursing throughout the organization. This release centers on the growing demands of user enablement through access and reach with special care for the compatibility between Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and 2013. Social Sites is now the first social business software fully compatible with SharePoint 2013, as well as SharePoint 2010 in the same code base, allowing existing company customers to upgrade with ease and confidence. Making connections and perspective easy, Social Sites introduced a personalized, universal toolbar that lets users monitor notifications, initiate new conversations, ask questions and respond to the items in their activity stream from any SharePoint page or web page. Putting the power of social in the hands of the user, social activity is now enabled from wherever employees choose to work, whether in native SharePoint or another web-based application.

NewsGator Technologies, Inc. announced an app to bring the social workplace to Windows 8 -- available now as a sideloaded Windows Store App. This cutting-edge app allows users to access Social Sites from their Windows 8 devices, and was built to mirror Microsoft Corp.'s new user experience. Using Lookout, a personalized drag-and-drop interface that provides intelligent information streams and more user control over how enterprise interactions and content are consumed, this sideloaded Windows Store app creates a very different social experience, unlike traditional, unproductive activity streams. The Lookout interface in Social Sites solves the biggest problem with the rapid adoption of today's social business tools: overwhelming users with information in activity streams, streams in which important information is often missed in the process. Lookout allows to choose the type of content the user want to view, creating intelligent information streams of relevant people, communities, topics, subjects, notifications, and more. Originally released in August 2012, this same user experience is available now in the Social Sites for Windows 8 app.

NewsGator Technologies, Inc. announced a new social learning offering for its Social Sites solution that taps the power of social technology to accelerate training, improve productivity, and make employees happier, among many other benefits. Social Sites Enrich helps companies create more agile and adaptive workforces using social learning capabilities that deliver information in a more natural, effective manner than tradition formal learning programs. Designed to appeal to the way people like to learn at work, Enrich enables in-the-moment social learning between colleagues, which leads to better information retention as they learn from experience while performing their jobs. Enrich makes it easy and rewarding for people to create, find and share knowledge to solve business problems. It also gives employees more control over building their own skills and competencies. Among the new Enrich capabilities are dynamic knowledge bases and video scenarios. Video learning scenarios enable a variety of challenging problems to be explained in a two-part question-and-answer video model that users can interact with at their point of need. Originally requested by and created for the U.S. Military Academy, NewsGator created this interactive feature as a place to post, discover, and search valuable peer-created content to enhance learning. The U.S. Military Academy in West Point, NY uses these interactive video scenarios to develop future Army officers. The program, called Leader Challenge, features the most challenging experiences officers are facing in combat and brings those experiences into the curriculum at West Point through interactive engagement. Because knowledge is being continuously generated as users collaborate and solve problems, Enrich makes it easy to capture that learning in a dynamic knowledge base. A place to post, discover and search valuable peer-created content to enhance learning, the knowledge base lets users create useful articles, add meaningful metadata to make it more "discoverable," and provide answers to frequently asked questions, among many other capabilities. Unlike talent management applications that aren't purpose-built for social networking and collaboration, NewsGator Social Sites provides a full suite of enterprise social capabilities to support all lines of business in a new way to get work done while showing immediate value to the business every day. Enrich is available immediately as an add-on module for NewsGator Social Sites v3.0.