May 23, 2008

blueKiwi Software, the leading european provider of enterprise social software, announced the availability of the blueKiwi SharePoint connector and blueKiwi OfficeAssistant - a set of components that enable the integration of blueKiwi's specialised social software suite with Microsoft's business productivity platform.

This is the product of of a partnership and joint investment by blueKiwi and Microsoft's emerging business technology group, and will benefit both customers of Microsoft and blueKiwi.  The goal behind this joint development initiative was to reinforce the vision that both companies share for enabling "people-ready" businesses.

The blueKiwi offering adds value to Microsoft's market leading Office 2007 platform by increasing the productivity of sales teams, creating a culture of innovation within organisations and enabling employees to be rewarded based on their internal contribution. To a large extent, these capabilities were developed in response to the needs of customers who have invested in both platforms, and are looking to maximise the returns on their investment in both technologies.

Don Dodge, Business Development Director in the Microsoft Emerging Business Team talks about the Microsoft partnership: 

"The Microsoft  team has been very pleased to invest time and resources working with blueKiwi Software on integrating their social software suite with the Microsoft platform. blueKiwi is an exciting, innovative solution that aligns to Microsoft's vision of enabling People-Ready Businesses across the world. The result of this partnership is that customers can choose SharePoint as a world class information management platform, complemented by blueKiwi's world class specialised social networking suite, and the familiar authoring environment of the Microsoft Office 2007 client applications."

"By integrating blueKiwi, Office and SharePoint, our customers benefit from adding rich social networking capabilities to their existing Microsoft Business Productivity platform.", says Carlos Diaz, CEO blueKiwi Software

blueKiwi SharePoint connector

The blueKiwi SharePoint connector allows SharePoint customers to integrate blueKiwi's complementary, highly specialised social software suite into their existing SharePoint environment, surfacing valuable social metrics, such as the most active discussions across the whole organisation, within a SharePoint portal.

Customers who are using the complete SharePoint Enterprise Platform can also maximise their investment by storing any relevant file attachments from the blueKiwi Enterprise Social Suite in their SharePoint environment, in line with corporate and legal policies.

In addition, SharePoint files can be attached to any blueKiwi note by browsing the SharePoint document library from within blueKiwi.
 

blueKiwi complements SharePoint by providing the following capabilities:

• an enterprise blogging and conversation platform that allows end users to share ideas quickly and easily, including rich text, audio and video
• a people-centric view of any contributions (blogs or comments on others blogs) that an employee has made within any community across the entire organisation
• a dynamic social network that is automatically defined by the interactions between people
• automatic expertise classification based on the type of content that an individual contributes
• expertise search platform that integrates with SharePoint search, making it easy to define expertise automatically and find experts quickly
• rich and dynamic user profiles
• social metrics, allowing employee contributions to be measured and rewarded
• dynamic content tag cloud, providing a visual representation of the topics that are talked about the most across a community or the whole company.
• dynamic social tag cloud, providing a view of which people share common interests or interact with each other the most.

 
blueKiwi OfficeAssistant

The blueKiwi Office Assistant is an Office 2007 add-in that allows knowledge workers to publish content to the social network directly from within Microsoft Office client applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

With the blueKiwi OfficeAssistant :

• End users can easily author content from within Microsoft Word 2007 and publish content directly into the blueKiwi social network.
• Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files can be uploaded as social network content directly from within the Office application.
• Knowledge workers can publish a Microsoft Word 2007 document as a wiki, enabling mass collaboration on that document.
• Sales people can publish a RFP (Request For Proposal) as a "wikidoc", enabling multiple people to simultaneously respond to the RFP and turn in around in a faster timeframe

About blueKiwi Software

blueKiwi software (www.bluekiwi-software.com) is the leading european provider of enterprise social software. Our solution enables people-centric organisations to create powerful and secure social networks where employees can share conversations, ideas, skills, resources and best practice with one another. Our software promotes a culture of collaboration and openness that helps large and complex businesses increase their sales productivity, foster new ideas and increase staff satisfaction and retention.