NewsGator Simplifies Management of Online Communities With New Version of NewsGator Tomoye

DENVER, Jan. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Since no online community runs purely by itself, NewsGator today unveiled new features for its NewsGator Tomoye collaboration software to dramatically simplify management of online communities.

A new consolidated management console aggregates user accounts, memberships, and the most common management commands – approve user, delete user, assign user to a community, edit user account, disable community feature, etc. – replacing pull-down menus with a single window. The unified dashboard eliminates unnecessary menu navigation, extraneous clicks, and any need for training.

This streamlined interface is just one way NewsGator Tomoye is empowering community managers who are so vital to the success of social computing. By simplifying community management, NewsGator Tomoye provides a solid foundation for orderly expansion as community participation scales.

"While communities largely rely on the members for content and to ensure the focus remains relevant, leaders at a community or larger practice center can find membership management to be a time intensive task without the kind of management console that has been added by NewsGator Tomoye in response to customer feedback," noted Mike Dorohovich, an industry professional with more than 15 years of experience supporting communities of practice for the Department of Defense.

NewsGator Tomoye is social computing software geared especially toward communities of practice (e.g., defined by role, title, or work area) for collaboration and social learning. It is popular among government agencies, companies establishing extranets, and Windows SharePoint Services/SharePoint Foundations shops that want to introduce user expertise profiles and business collaboration tools. NewsGator Tomoye supports some of the largest and most successful communities of practice in the world, including the U.S. Army with 150,000 users.

This community management feature is just one innovative result of NewsGator's acquisition of Tomoye last year. "Our development teams have become a single team collaborating not only to synthesize the best of NewsGator Social Sites and NewsGator Tomoye, but to come up with entirely new capabilities that will redefine social computing over the next decade," said J.B. Holston, NewsGator president and CEO.

In addition to the community management console, NewsGator Tomoye 3.2 also ports all the capabilities of NewsGator Tomoye to SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. These capabilities include structured questions and answers, wikis, blogs, video, expert discovery, colleague networking, tagging, file sharing, filtering social bookmarking, search and more.

When coupled with SharePoint, NewsGator Tomoye supports SharePoint search and security, providing users with access to only the content they are permitted to see. User profiles are also integrated so that expertise is uncovered wherever it resides.

"Our customers are quickly adopting SharePoint 2010 and Tomoye is evolving with them," said Eric Sauve, NewsGator vice president of Tomoye. "As one of our customers likes to say, SharePoint is where we work and Tomoye is how we work."

NewsGator Tomoye 3.2 is available now. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

About NewsGator Technologies

NewsGator, founded in 2004, offers award-winning enterprise social computing solutions. Our flagship product – Social Sites® – is social computing software built directly inside Microsoft SharePoint. With over 2.5 million paid enterprise users, NewsGator helps the Fortune 2000 and the government to better collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge, and improve productivity. Customers achieving results include Accenture, Biogen Idec, CME Federal Credit Union, Deloitte, Fujitsu, Novartis, the United States Air Force, and the United States Army. Get social at www.newsgator.com.

SOURCE NewsGator Technologies, Inc.