SharePoint 2007 social networking
Robert has some interesting anc constructive feedback on our new offering for Sharepoint 2007 - the social networking addon that we're using internally and have called it Academy Mobile. He found this on Mike's blog.
We have an internal training initiative which we call the Academy. It's an opportunity for the field facing sales and technical team to get up to speed with up and coming products before products launch. In the past we've used the Academy with instructors and coursework as a readiness training opportunity for the Technical presales team across the world. We've recently added the concept of social networking to the training Academy and called it "Academy Mobile". This allows us to upload videos (like Soapbox) and podcasts and rate the content accordingly. So often intranets are full of data that hasn't been looked at in ages, and is sub standard. Academy Mobile allows staff to rate podcasts and videos, so that the good stuff bubbles to the top to be accessed. Here are the links to Mike's videos on Soapbox talking about it...
Academy Mobile 1
Academy Mobile Video 2
Academy Mobile Video 3
This ties in well with the community kit I talked about yesterday and it's a great way to get interaction between people inside a company and move them away from sending mails with huge attachments...
But Robert isn't happy with our offerings...
“While this appears to be cool and all, if I can’t access it to use it (ala other social networks) and I can’t show it to my clients, what is the current value to me as a Microsoft Partner or to my clients?
Actually Robert has a good point. We can go into customers and talk about Academy Live as we use it here internally, but that's just one of us talking to a few customers.
Outside of a few canned videos, just how do partners get the chance to evangelise this to their own customers? How do we give everyone the chance to have a look at how powerful SharePoint actually is??? Do we need to create a new version of this social networking tool and give access to everyone so that they can have a look at how to build something similar inside their own companies? I'd love to hear your thoughts...
