From Facebook to MySpace, social networking sites in the consumer market have grown immensely, but these sites aren't just for teenagers and college students anymore. Businesses are seeing the full benefit of keeping their employees connected by turning their intranet sites into social networks.

Enter NewsGator Technologies, which on June 9th released Social Sites 2.0, an upgraded version of its social computing solution for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Social Sites 2.0 offers enhanced capabilities to help businesses and their employees collaborate and discover information.

Originally conceived with a focus on distributing RSS feeds, NewsGator eventually extended its reach to include online sites and additional products. Two and a half years ago, the company launched an enterprise server product and started offering it to major brands and media sites. This grew into the NewsGator Widget, which was targeted at news companies that use an online platform to pull in content in widget form.

Just nine months ago, Microsoft indicated that Sharepoint could benefit from improved social networking capabilities. NewGator immediately took the lead and focused on using a social site to make Sharepoint more dynamic and relevant to businesses. "Sharepoint, as a product, has tremendous penetration, but doesn't do a lot of things really well," says Brian Kellner, VP of products for NewsGator. "It has the ability to read RSS built-in, but only lets you bring in one feed and can't tag or save. In contrast, we'll bring in a collection of feeds, collect attention data, add tags, allow people to share them with others easily, and build tag shares."

With Social Sites 2.0, users can organize their own information as well as create a dynamic public profile. They can add other colleagues to their profiles and exchange information through real time updates, feed recommendations, and keyword cloud tags. Users can also see personal information, such as birthdays and status updates. These features permit users to discover information easily and quickly move through content. One intriguing feature of Social Sites 2.0 is the mini-profile. Users can preview a colleague’s profile by mousing over a link to the profile. Up pops a thumbnail view of the full profile, which shows their photo and lists a bit of basic information.

The community section allows any user to create a new community group around common interests, areas of research, and projects. "The community portion of the site lets people collaborate around content. This can be done easily with a couple of clicks and they can be off and running together," says Laura Farrelly, Director of Marketing for NewsGator. Users can add tags to a community, which, when clicked, show a list of other communities with related tags that may be of interest. Important content can also be marked in red, assuring that information is up to date. Social Sites 2.0 is fully integrated with email, which allows users to participate in group discussions and their communities without having to log on to the site.

In addition to these enhancements, users can receive customized recommendations—such as colleague recommendations, news, tag clouds, search, and lists of recently created and popular communities—all of which are chosen based on the user’s portal activity and behavior. Users can also get a graphic visualization of their social network and see their closest connection based on intranet activity, common interests, and content.

"Partners and customers on the outside want to bring in and participate in the right types of communities. Peoples lives are both inside and outside," says Kellner. The success of social networking in consumer spaces has sparked a desire to apply this achievement in an enterprise setting. Says Farrelly: "Social Sites 2.0 turns into a more engaging environment. People are discovering employees and getting their questions answered. They find it worthwhile."

(www.newsgator.com)

FTI Consulting, Inc., the global business advisory firm, announced that is has signed a merger agreement to acquire Attenex Corporation, an eDiscovery software provider. The total purchase price for the transaction is approximately $88 million in cash and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008. After amortization of intangibles, the acquisition is expected to be neutral to FTI’s earnings per share in 2008 and accretive in 2009. Attenex Patterns eDiscovery software automates data processing and provides visualization tools for analyzing large amounts of electronically stored information (ESI). Attenex will be integrated into the FTI Technology segment.

 (www.attenex.com, www.fticonsulting.com)

RockYou, creator and distributor of widgets and applications on the social web, announced it has closed a Series C funding round of $35 million led by DCM, a venture capital firm. Several private investors also participated in the round. The funding will enable the company to grow its team, increase its advertising and publisher offerings, and expand its portfolio of social applications. RockYou can be found on social networks, including MySpace, hi5, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster and more.

 (http://rockyou.com, www.dcm.com)

The New York Times now provides summaries of its own stories. Newser, the online news synthesizer, will be pulling the "must-read" stories and giving a summary of each, housed in a NY Times grid you can scan in 60 seconds. Newser also launches "Best of the Glossies" and "Pundit Watch"—new grids featuring the day’s best magazine stories and opinion pieces from all over the Web. Newser adds local news streams for more than 70 U.S. markets and another 16 international English-speaking cities using RSS feeds from sources selected by Newser’s editors. Newser Local will provide sports coverage from the AP and restaurant and nightlife reviews via Yelp.

(www.newser.com)

Open Text Corporation, an enterprise software company, announced enhancements to its portfolio of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, including an offering that lets customers manage compliance rules for social computing capabilities, such as blogs, wikis, and forums on websites, and a set of collaboration tools for more dynamic employee interaction within the enterprise. Enhancements include fully integrated social networking, the ability to leverage content sources in an organization for social networking, persona-driven web access tailored to respective information requirements, expanded web compliance capabilities, which let customers apply regulatory or legal rules to user-generated content in social computing applications compliance, and validation services.

 (www.opentext.com, www.reddot.com)

ADAM Software, a Digital Asset Management company, released ADAM 4.3 the latest version of their enterprise Digital Asset Management platform. With the release of 4.3 ADAM delivers strengths such as infinite taxonomy, robust media workflows, all format support, flexibility, scalability, with search options, broader video support with preview capabilities, and a rules-concept to automatically trigger workflows. Other new features include expanded full txt-search, which can be used to store various video previews or image renderings and new classification browser control.

(www.adamsoftware.net)

Comtex News Network, Inc., provider of economically useful electronic real-time news, content, and SmarTrend market products, announced that news from Business Wire in XHTML format will soon be available to all its clients. XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a format that retains the features and functionality of the original document while enhancing online search functions. XHTML allows content providers more control regarding the look and feel of their press releases. Issuers are to embed hyperlinks behind keywords, present wider earnings tables that include underlines, and include bullets & superscript notations.

 (www.comtex.com, www.mysmartrend.com)

The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters announced that Taylor & Francis, an international academic and scientific publisher, has increased its current contract to license Manuscript Central for the online peer-review management of an additional 470 journals worldwide. The 770 journals that will use Manuscript Central span the scientific, technical, medical, humanities and social science disciplines. Taylor & Francis annually publishes 1350 journals for customers working as researchers, students, academics, and professionals.

 (www.scholarone.com, www.thomsonreuters.com)   

Local Matters, Inc., provider software and media services, and Apptus, announced the completion of a solution enabling Quebecor MediaPages, a Quebecor Media subsidiary that publishes print and online directories across Canada, to integrate its print and online directories into one website, Canoe411.ca.The beta format of Canoe411.ca was launched in April and became the exclusive e-directory on the Canoe network. Local Matters’ customized solution for MediaPages is designed to broaden the revenue and distribution opportunities for merchants advertising through Canoe411.ca by delivering consumer local search services.

 (www.apptus.com, www.localmatters.com, www.mediapages.ca)

DeviceLock, provider of endpoint device control software solutions, enables security administrators to centrally control, log, and audit end-user access to peripheral devices and local ports from enterprise systems. Using Microsoft Active Directory integration, DeviceLock can be deployed, managed, and administered from within an existing Microsoft AD installation without an additional management server. DeviceLock supports non-Active Directory environments. The dtSearch Engine provides searching of terabytes of data, can index over a terabyte of text in an index, search static and dynamic web-based data sources, popular "Office" file types, SQL, and other databases. After a search, the dtSearch Engine can display web-based documents WYSIWYG, with all links and images intact, and the sole addition of highlighted hits.

(www.devicelock.com, www.dtsearch.com)

Accucoms, provider of sales and marketing services to scholarly and society publishers, announced the launch of an eBook sales service for academic publishers. The service has been piloted with a number of customers and is now being offered to new and existing publisher clients. Accucoms will use the participating publisher’s current subscriber and prospect list combined with its own extensive database of contacts to promote and sell eBook packages to librarians who already purchase the publisher’s content, or who collect in a relevant subject area.

(www.accucoms.com)

Ovid, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health and provider of electronic medical, scientific, and academic information research solutions, announced it has expanded its Shibboleth compliance for OvidSP and SilverPlatter, its two search and discovery platforms, to French and German Federations. Institutions in France and German can establish authorization rights for end users allowing for single sign-on access to resources on OvidSP and SilverPlatter.

 (www.ovid.com, www.wkhealth.com)

Credo Reference, the online reference library, and ABC-CLIO, recently agreed to integrate 24 key ABC-CLIO titles into the Credo General Reference collection. With the new agreement, Credo users will have access to titles from ABC-CLIO such as Encyclopedia of Archaeology: History and Discoveries, and Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: A Global Encyclopedia. Credo will now include all six titles from the "Ethnic Diversity Within Nations" series, including Canada’s Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook, South Africa’s Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook, and four titles from the "History of Science" series, including Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia and Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. 12 additional titles covering literature, women’s studies, history, business, and social sciences will also become part of the Credo Reference collection.

 (www.credoreference.com, www.abc-clio.com)

2collab, the research collaboration platform from Elsevier, publisher of science, technology and medical (STM) information, announced the results of a survey, asking researchers working in academia and government institutions about the role of social media in their professional lives. The survey, which yielded over 1,800 responses, revealed that scientists and researchers are using blogs, wikis, social networking, and bookmarking applications primarily for professional reasons and that these social media applications have provided them with additional resources to help collaborate, connect, share, and discover information.

Over 50% of respondents see web-based social applications playing a key role in shaping the future of research. The largest influence will be on critical analysis and evaluation of research data, professional networking and collaboration, dissemination of research output, career development, as well as grant application and funding. Several issues were identified such as the need for specialist tools, higher security, and validation of users.

(www.2collab.com)