Production Blog Reviews

NewsGator today announced that it will acquire Tomoye, a vendor that has long focused on enabling collaborative communities within the enterprise. I've only come across Tomoye in governmental settings but the vendor has been in the community space for some time. Tomoye has also been one of the vendors placing bets on SharePoint (as has NewsGator) so the deal is synergistic in that regard. In June 2008, I published a blog post Microsoft's Maturing Social Computing "EGO", that outlined different ways that vendors could integrate with MOSS 2007 to provide social computing capabilities. NewsGator and Tomoye were both on that list.

This is a prudent move by NewsGator. Social Sites frequently comes up in discussions with clients committed to Microsoft. Often, Social Sites has been viewed as an effective (tactical) "bridging" solution available to organizations in anticipation of the next release of SharePoint. Social Sites extends SharePoint by enabling "Facebook"-like features with an emphasis on communities (an area that Microsoft has only begun to understand and focus on with SP2010). The solution also leverages NewsGator Enterprise Server (a feed syndication platform).

The concern I have with NewsGator was how the company was going to innovate ahead of the shadow SharePoint casts on its partners in the social computing area. While this deal does not solve all concerns, acquiring Tomoye provides NewsGator with three things: (1) people experienced in the community space, (2) a more complete technology platform that compliments Social Sites as well as SharePoint, and (3) a stand-alone option for organizations not interested in SharePoint.

The deal potentially places NewsGator in roughly the same category as Telligent except right now, I mostly see NewsGator/Tomoye as an intranet play - and perhaps as an extranet play down the road as SharePoint improves in that regard re: SP2010. I do not see a consumer (customer-facing, social media, etc) play here right now. I would hope to see a statement of direction on hosted versions of SharePoint as well (i.e., BPOS). Telligent still has stronger analytics, a consumer facing solution, and more experience in the community space than NewsGator. But inMicrosoft-shops - I expect these two vendors to cross paths more often.

Overall - a pragmatic move by NewsGator and Tomoye but we should wait and see how an integrated solution pans out and some actually client implementations before hailing things as being successful.