NewsGator Honored With the 2011 Frost & Sullivan Customer Value Enhancement Award

DENVER, Sept. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Global research organization Frost & Sullivan has presented NewsGator with its 2011 North America Customer Value Enhancement Award for Enterprise Collaboration Software. The award is in recognition of the outstanding value NewsGator's Social Sites software delivers to companies looking to benefit from social collaboration technology.

Presented each year to a company demonstrating excellence and "inordinate focus" on enhancing the value its customers receive, Frost & Sullivan selected NewsGator after a thorough evaluation of its flagship social enterprise computing offering, Social Sites 2010, and the advanced social collaboration capabilities it seamlessly delivers to Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange users.

Given the growing interest in enterprise social collaboration technologies, as well as the investments made both in technology and personnel to support the Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange platforms, the Frost & Sullivan award report states "it is natural that when these vested organizations are in search of social business capabilities, they demand solutions that augment and extend their established assets."

"Understanding the customer's core needs is absolutely vital if you want to grow your business," said J.B. Holston, president & CEO of NewsGator. "This award is highly gratifying evidence that we are right in step with our customers' needs to get the most out of their existing IT investments and to make a quick successful move to social collaboration," he added.

Frost & Sullivan evaluated Social Sites 2010 Version v2.0, NewsGator's flagship social enterprise computing offering. Designed from the ground up to run as an integrated managed service application on top of the Microsoft SharePoint platform, this latest version of Social Sites continues NewsGator's rapid evolution approach to keep users at the forefront of best-in-class social collaboration.

Social Sites 2010 Version 2.0 features and capabilities include:

• Enterprise-class microblogging capabilities including the ability to share (i.e., re-Tweet) activities/events in the activity stream, send private messages to counterparts, and flag events/items for later follow-up;
• Advanced email integration that lets users initiate a question or a microblog conversation to the whole organization or any specific community via email. Users can also choose to get notifications for questions and/or microblogs for each community they join. Coupled with the existing ability to reply to email notifications, this new feature allows companies to switch from email distribution lists to rich, collaborative communities while still letting users work from within their email client.
• Community template functionality that lets central administrators pre-define look, feel, features, and content for new communities. This enables an organization to create a standard project community that differs from the standard community of practice, for example.
• Tag and hashtag functions to improve community discovery and automatic distribution of valuable content.

According to the Frost & Sullivan analysts the business benefits customers derive from Social Sites' seamless integration with SharePoint are manifold, including allowing "organizations to easily and securely expand and strengthen relationships between users and content, and to create new ways of working that can eliminate bottle necks or traditional top-down information flows."

About NewsGator

As a Microsoft Gold Certified and Depth Managed Partner, NewsGator is helping nearly three million paid users in industries across the globe propel the future of productivity. NewsGator Social Sites delivers robust social technology to the enterprise with proven scalability and security to flagship clients like Accenture, Adidas, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Merck & Co., Unisys Corporation, and the US Army. No other social software vendor can rival our deep integration with the entire Microsoft stack – reducing your total cost of ownership while increasing adoption, collaboration, and innovation. And for all that, Microsoft honored us as its 2011 US Partner of the Year. We're making SharePoint and Office365 social. Follow us @newsgator!  www.newsgator.com

SOURCE NewsGator