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 manyarticlesposted 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.