What you need to know to choose the right social solution for your organization.

The Social Enterprise Buyer’s Guide

INTRODUCTIONThis guide is intended to help familiarize you with the essentials of social business platforms so you can select the option that makes the most sense for your business—now and in the future.

Before the advent of social business applications, corporate digital communications generally took one of two forms: two-way emails between a select group of individuals or easy-to-overlook mass emails sent to every employee.

Social business communication is more akin to striking up a conversation in an o!ce hallway. It’s a spontaneous way to connect that allows end users to decide which conversations they want to be part of and how they want to get involved. It also helps employees find experts they can collaborate with in real-time to solve problems faster and more e"ectively.

As more and more companies are discovering, it’s far easier to drive employee engagement and productivity when a social platform is in place. This is why social solutions are such powerful innovation drivers—particularly in organizations with multiple locations. By helping people connect more easily, they drive bigger ideas and faster, smarter decisions at every turn.

At Sitrion, we help employees to get their job done better every day. In a complex enterprise world, we enable an engaged workforce to stay connected, make smart decisions and be productive. Leveraging their investments in SAP or SharePoint, millions of users depend on us to drive innovation, discover untapped expertise and simplify business processes. Follow us on Twitter @sitrion and at www.sitrion.com.

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Naturally, not all social business platforms work in the same way or o"er the same benefits. That’s why this guide was created—to help you ask the right questions before you commit to a solution for your organization. Let’s take a look at four key areas you need to focus on when evaluating your options:

INFORMATION SECURITY – Does the social platform o"er the level of data security your business requires?

COMMUNICATION – How does the solution drive engagement to improve productivity and customer support?

COLLABORATION – How easy is it for employees to share information and work together to power innovation?

BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGRATION – How well does the solution link with existing processes to drive revenue?

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Let’s take a brief look at some of the social business platforms you’re likely to be considering if you operate in the Microsoft ecosystem.

SHAREPOINT® 2013The newest SharePoint release o"ers a variety of new social features that are designed to make it more up to date. SharePoint has become more useful in things like sharing content and creating communities, but it’s still relatively weak in the way it handles profiles, expertise searches, innovation tools and business process integration.

YAMMER®

Yammer lets you add social features to SharePoint in the cloud and makes it easy for departments to roll out group communication capabilities without placing high demands on your IT team. However, Yammer has limitations in important areas like security, SharePoint integration (both on-premise and in the cloud), and collaboration capabilities.

SITRION®

Sitrion, formerly NewsGator, provides an advanced, highly integrated social platform that doesn’t place your data at risk. The intuitive Sitrion interface makes it easy to find experts, create communities, share knowledge, track files, collaborate with distant coworkers, integrate key business processes and generate helpful analytics reports.

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INFORMATION SECURITYBUSINESS CHALLENGEYou need to keep any data your company stores completely safe in order to:

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Does an on-premise or a cloud solution make the most sense for my company?

This is a very important question because it’s all about where your content lives. On-premise solutions keep data on-site and safely behind your corporate firewall. If you’re concerned about the security of the content your employees post (particularly research, pricing, legal analysis, proprietary details, etc.) an on-premise solution o"ers you complete peace of mind. Cloud solutions can be more a"ordable to implement but pose security concerns you may not be prepared to take on—especially if you’re in a highly regulated industry.

With Sitrion, your social solution sits on top of the SharePoint platform, and all of your social content lives securely on-premise behind your firewall. With other social platforms that store information in a multi-tenant cloud, there is far less integration with SharePoint and no guarantee that posted information will be kept private or secure. (It can also be di!cult to take down unwanted posts or remove old users.) Sitrion does o"er cloud and on-premise/cloud hybrid solutions if you need them, but your information is more secure since it’s stored in a dedicated cloud, not in a multi-tenant cloud.

Do my documents need to be in an auditable system?

Many industries require that information be stored in a records management system for six to eight years. With other solutions, documents often live in two di"erent places—in the cloud and in SharePoint somewhere else. If you’re using both tools together, from an IT perspective you need to synchronize or duplicate files if you want them in both places. Otherwise, it’s hard to find what you need in an audit situation.

Tight integration with SharePoint makes Sitrion a secure, auditable system that easily accommodates any retrieval requirements you may have. Everything is automatically synchronized and easy to archive and retrieve. If you share documents in SharePoint, there’s a huge benefit to having your conversations where those documents actually live.

Assuming security is a big concern for you, here are some of the questions you need to answer when considering di!erent social business platform options.

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Will my company retain ownership of our own content?

With Sitrion, you never give up ownership of your own content and intellectual property. With ‘freemium’ versions of other solutions, you can lose access and rights to content as it technically belongs to the vendor. This presents risk to your organization. Also, regaining control of this content may require an expensive upgrade.

Is it easy to execute legal holds, report abuse or remove inappropriate content?

Sitrion understands how important it is to be able to moderate the type of content that appears on your company’s social activity streams. It’s why we’ve built solutions into our platform that make all of these initiatives easy to carry out. With other social platforms, even basic moderation can be complex and time-consuming.

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COMMUNICATION BUSINESS CHALLENGEA social business network helps your employees communicate better with each other and engage more deeply with your company. This helps your business:

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Is it easy to suggest ideas and encourage communication across my company?

Sitrion makes it easy to suggest ideas with Idea Stream, a tool that empowers employees to propose new ideas to the organization, either informally or in full-blown campaigns. Thanks to built-in forms, reporting and controls, it’s easy to open up any idea to coworker comments, ‘likes’ or votes.

Other solutions let you do basic cross-company communication. If you want to drive innovation, however, you need to bridge separate systems by turning to a third party. To get the innovation you want, you have to leave your SharePoint environment and go to the cloud. It’s not easy, integrated, elegant or secure.

Is there a way to improve my internal communications capabilities?

Sitrion is currently the only social business platform to o"er a dedicated Internal Communications solution, allowing you to get the right message to the right person at the right time. You can target messages to specific groups or regions, schedule posts by time zone or even pin messages to the top of users’ activity streams for emphasis. You can also conduct polls, launch forums, engage employees in spontaneous conversations, and track and analyze engagement across your company.

Can I adapt the look of my social platform so it matches my brand?

Since Sitrion is completely integrated in the SharePoint environment, you simply use SharePoint to adapt your look and feel. Other solutions that aren’t fully integrated with SharePoint do not allow you to do this.

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Can I get input from coworkers I don’t know and flag the best answers?

This is an important question because finding experts who can help you quickly solve real business problems is one of the key reasons to invest in a social enterprise platform. Unlike other solutions, Sitrion lets you clearly indicate when a post is a question so that you can get answers faster. In fact, as you type in a question, the system analyzes it in real time and points you to answers to similar questions.

Sitrion employs intelligent routing to trigger notifications to community members who are best suited to provide an answer. Unlike other systems, Sitrion gives you the ability to identify the best answers to make coworkers aware of the best solutions. Users also have more ways to interact with questions—by liking them, commenting on them or attaching useful files.

Can I create knowledge bases on a personal, group or organization-wide basis?

Sitrion lets you build knowledge bases, add to them and bookmark them for select individuals or groups. Knowledge bases can be created from internal content living inside your Intranet or external content on any website, allowing virtually anything to become shared knowledge across your organization. Knowledge bases can also be tagged so they can be further leveraged as part of internal information searches.

Other solutions do not o"er knowledge bases, but use wikis instead. You can mark things for the entire organization, but not for individuals or groups.

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COLLABORATIONBUSINESS CHALLENGEImplementing a social platform across your business helps you share ideas and collaborate faster so you can:

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Is it easy to find experts on particular topics?

With other systems, employees are asked to list their areas of expertise in their user profiles. Often these profiles are incomplete or remain unchanged for years. This limits your ability to find the right experts when you need them.

Sitrion user profiles are far more accurate because employees build credentials based on their actual activity. The engine we’ve built into our Spotlight solution constantly reviews what’s in your profile, what questions you’re answering, what documents you’re submitting and so forth. This is why—if you’re looking for help with a specific task—Sitrion is incredibly e"ective at serving up individuals across your company with precisely the skill sets and expertise you need.

Can I generate analytics that measure success and help me drive adoption?

Sitrion’s built-in analytics let you track activity levels, build communities and drive adoption across your company. This way you can determine the true business value of our solution over a period of time.

SharePoint has an SQL database that captures information, but it does not provide out-of-the-box social information and is fairly limited in its application. Other solutions have an analytics platform and dashboard, but they are quite limited and not integrated into the SharePoint environment.

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Can I involve multiple groups in a conversation with a single post?

Sitrion makes it easy to bring together this type of interdepartmental collaboration. With other solutions, it’s very di!cult to involve multiple groups in conversation since each group is in a di"erent location and you can only target one group at a time. This creates disparate communication threads and makes it harder to create cross-department communities.

Does the solution reward desired behavior or recognize user accomplishments?

In SharePoint, you can use ‘reputations’ within a community to reward people for their involvement in a community. Others let you build users’ digital reputations by praising them, but it’s all based on peer-to-peer declarations.

Sitrion uses a spotlight capability called ‘kudos’ to determine reputation based on what users are actually doing. When you make contributions, your expert ranking gets a boost with digital rewards. You can also recognize people and link their accomplishments with real business results using digital badges and employee awards. It’s all part of how Sitrion increases employee productivity by making work fun and meaningful.

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BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGRATION BUSINESS CHALLENGEThe right social solution fits seamlessly with the way you work by integrating with your most important infrastructure. This helps you to drive the most possible value from your:

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Is the solution completely integrated with my SharePoint environment?

Sitrion runs as a managed service application on top of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or 2013. Because it’s so closely integrated, Sitrion is the only social networking solution built for SharePoint that o"ers a single unified solution for search, security and user profiles. This greatly facilitates deployment and management, reducing the burden on IT.

Can I easily track and manage my internal communications?

Sitrion’s dedicated Internal Communications solution makes it easy to track and manage employee engagement with whatever information you post. In addition to being able to request feedback from employees on corporate initiatives in real time, the solution lets you generate reports with tracking data that shows employee engagement on an individual, departmental, regional or company-wide basis.

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Will this solution integrate with other social platforms or my ERP software?

Most social business platforms let you integrate other leading social networks into their stream. What’s unique about Sitrion is that it actually takes things a step farther by allowing you to integrate with feeds like Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft Dynamics. Sitrion also integrates with ERP programs from Microsoft, Oracle or SAP. This way you never need to log into a di"erent system to add social interaction to your day-to-day workflow and approval processes.

Can I participate in social collaboration directly from other programs, such as my email client?

Another feature that’s unique to Sitrion is the ability to integrate with Outlook, so you can engage with your activity stream right inside your email client and keep up with the latest news, create groups or join conversations. You can also interact with email and calendar items directly from your Sitrion interface or use the universal notification toolbar to connect with social activities on any web page. By integrating your communication activities in this way, Sitrion saves you time and enables you to collaborate precisely where and how you want.

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The Sitrion enterprise social platform integrates easily with SharePoint and your existing ecosystem to enable social collaboration across your entire company—all while giving you complete control over security and confidentiality.

Get in touch with Sitrion if you want to help your employees:

# Interact more easily with coworkers# Share research and methodologies# Locate expert support quickly# Keep up with company developments# Stay connected on the go# Create thriving communities

For a feature-by-feature comparison of the leading social business platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem, visit www.sitrion.com or call us at 1-800-608-4597 for a free consultation.

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