Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian.
SharePoint Connector for Confluence
This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.
Every SharePoint user will get their own personal blog and wiki, which will enhance the possibility of making a great Enterprise 2.0 site.
This connector is currently available as beta at no cost.
Newsgator Social Sites
NewsGator Social Sites is a set of site templates, Web parts and middleware to enhance the social computing for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Here you will find even better feed/blog management, tag clouds, feed statistics and more.
These are great additions to SharePoint, I have not yet tried them out, but it's on my agenda for sure! I have for a long time talked warmly about the enterprise version of Web 2.0 called Enterprise 2.0. At least here in Sweden it is difficult to get this concept going but this tool will surely get us in the right direction.
