As you probably already know, Microsoft SharePoint includes a number of Web 2.0 features such as Wikis, Blogs, My Site, Colleague Tracking and more. While these features provide some of the utility required in business social networking tools, most organizations have found it difficult to utilize out of the box SharePoint for this purpose. MemberToMember™ uses SharePoint as the foundation to create an enterprise ready, full-fledged social networking product. MemberToMember™ is used to connect members, partners, constituents, customers, and staff with one another to provide an environment of collaboration and two-way communication. Better still, your users are NOT required to be stored in your organizations Active Directoy - your user store can be an existing CRM, AMS, a home grown database or even a SharePoint list!
Note: While MemberToMember™ runs on the SharePoint platform, you DO NOT need to own SharePoint to take advantage of these powerful capabilities. In fact, you don’t even have to host the platform if you don’t want to. MemberToMember™ is also offered in the cloud (SaaS model). This gives you all the Collaboration & Content Management of SharePoint, as well as the Social Networking!
Based on the world class Microsoft SharePoint platform, MemberToMember™ adds all the social networking capabilities your users have grown accustomed to using with sites like Facebook and LinkedIn – but now YOU can own your community!
MemberToMember™ boasts a full complement of robust community features that allow members to share information, request help and network with one another.
Blogs: Allowing members to create personal blogs is one of the ways to create ‘stickiness’ around your community. The presence of good, active bloggers within a community encourages members to return to the site to read and comment on the latest posting. MemberToMember’s blog functionality includes a WYSIWYG interface familiar to anyone who has used Microsoft Word or a similar product. Formatting, including font selection, size and color can allow bloggers to give the blog its own flavor. When images are used, bloggers can upload new images to the site or use public images uploaded earlier. Bloggers can also schedule postings so that a posting appears at just the right time. Blog tagging includes not only the site-wide tags that are a part of the community taxonomy, but, also the ability for bloggers to create their own tags or “folksonomy” for their postings.
Discussions: Discussions exist in MemberToMember both as a standalone feature that can be viewed by all community members and within the Groups function. In both cases Discussions work the same way. Members can browse and search existing Discussion threads or choose to create their own. Discussions function much like traditional bulletin boards where a member posts a comment or question and others can respond. In order to track discussion activity a member can subscribe to alerts which provide email notifications of new activities. Those discussions which are WaveBoard™ enabled can read and responded to completely through email.
Groups: Within MemberToMember™, Groups are the main mechanism for bringing together members with similar interests. Groups contain topic specific discussions and workspaces for members to collaborate. Within a Group members can see and communicate with other members, invite colleagues to join the group, and participate in discussions. When a group is created, the group owner provides a group name, summary description, full description and an optional image or logo for the group. Admission to the group can be set up as Auto Approved, where anyone who requests it is granted membership. Setting Registration to Require Approval allows the Group Owner to control who is granted membership within the Group. Further security settings allow the Group Owner to determine who can access group content, specifically the discussions and documents. An open Group allows all community members to view the pages within the Group while a closed Group requires membership to view the content.
Content Commenting and Rating: All original content created in a MemberToMember™ community can be rated and commented on by members. This includes not only blog postings, discussions and wikis, but also the comments associated with them. The rating format available on the community is determined by the sponsoring organization and can consist of any scale utilizing icons such are stars, dots, or a custom image numbering up to 10. Most scales utilize five rating points. MemberToMember™ prevents members from rating their own content ensuring that ratings are indicative of community at large. Within Groups content can only be rated and commented on by members of the Group.
My Network: MemberToMember™ is all about building professional relationships and the networks. The My Network box is available throughout the site to give member a quick glance and easy reference for everything they are involved in.
My Profile: The My Profile section is used to allow members to provide information about themselves to the rest of the community. Typical fields include a Bio, Education, Employment History and Interests, but, fields are configurable based on the sponsoring organization’s needs. My Profile information can be pulled from an external database, stored within MemberToMember or a combination thereof.
My InBox: In order to allow communication between members, but, still protect the privacy of personal email addresses, MemberToMember includes an InBox feature. Messages between members are sent and retrieved here with notifications going to the member’s registered email address.
My Colleagues: Connecting with Colleagues is the key to members benefiting from MemberToMember. The My Colleagues area includes all connected colleagues with their latest status updates, job title, a link to their blog, as well as links to any public files they may have uploaded to the site.
My Alerts: Lets you manage the notifications you are receiving from MemberToMember.
My Groups: All the groups that a member belongs to are displayed and accessible along with links to the Discussions, Updates, and Member for the Group.
My Discussions: If a member has participated in any discussions, they can be quickly accessed here. In order to simplify following a discussion thread, Discussions are broken down into “Discussions I’ve Started” and “Discussions I’ve Participated In.
My Blog: A direct link to the member’s blog within MemberToMember.
Site Search: MemberToMember’s™ site search is driven by the powerful SharePoint search engine. This engine is coupled with a community taxonomy tool to provide fast, useful search results that are categorized based on the type of content and the community tags. Searching for a word or phrase within the site returns a set of results for the entire community along with a list of community tags. These tags coincide with the site taxonomy and provide one way for the member to filter the search results. Additionally the member can filter the results by looking at only the discussions, blogs, groups or members that contain the search term.
Taxonomy Tool: With MemberToMember’s™ taxonomy tool, site administrators can manage the categories used for tagging content is tagged. With a simple tree interface, administrators can create and manage parent and child tags. In order to ensure that members tag content the Parent categories can be set to be required. Administrators can also decide what content types will have the taxonomy tags applied. For instance, because discussions can be a rapid-fire exchange between participants, administrators may choose to not apply taxonomy to the discussion.
Download the MemberToMember Social Networking Platform Slides (PDF format)