nGage Advances for SharePoint 2010

On its own, SharePoint 2010 is an environment that supports individual and collaborative creativity within an organization. But add nGage’s Innovations application, and you can start believing in your people as a reliable source of strong ideas for performance improvement, for cost savings and for competitive advantage.

Innovations provides comprehensive support for the submission, moderation, tracking, peer review, rating, recognition and celebration of ideas generated within your organization.

This application also includes Challenges, one of nGage’s most exciting features. Challenges makes it simple to define, target, launch and manage ‘time-boxed‘ campaigns that focus the combined intelligence, creativity and networks of your organization on your most pressing business problems and opportunities.

• Drive adoption to capture valuable knowledge
• Promote through My Site integration
• Manage Question categories
• Measure and celebrate engagement
• Build and maintain FAQs
• Rapid discovery through SharePoint Search

SharePoint 2010 provides a one-to-one Q&A facility via the Ask Me About and Note Board features on everyone’s My Sites. But by replacing it with nGage’s Collaborative Q&A application, you can make it something significantly more valuable: something that creates reusable knowledge for the whole organization.

For example, if you ask your question through Collaborative Q&A, it will seek out multiple experts for you and send you an email alert each time one suggests an answer. You can rate the answers and keep the question open until you’ve got what you need - knowing that, next time someone else has a similar question, the answers you got will be available to them via a regular SharePoint search.

nGage’s Q&A can even be used by subject experts to create and manage FAQs proactively – so that people get the answers they need to do their job even more quickly.

nGage’s 5-legged My Reputation ‘Spider’ is a visual summary of the level and nature of an individual’s ‘extra mile’ contributions to their organization - and of how they are regarded by their colleagues.

It’s fed by a combination of the Openness and Contributions features that come with nGage Prime, SharePoint’s own content rating system whenever possible – and an additional piece of user functionality: the ability to give, request and receive Feedback to and from fellow members of the organization.

Feedback given and received can be displayed separately on everyone’s My Site. But it is also accessible by clicking through the Valued (for Feedback Received) and Supportive (for Feedback Given) legs of the Spider.

In fact, the nGage Spider provides direct navigation to all the content and events that generated it.

And it’s very configurable; for example, you could choose to define ‘Proactive’ as reflecting an individual’s content contributions to both SharePoint itself and to a specific third party application.

The very idea of introducing a Reputation System will be seen as a cultural risk by some organizations. More will see the value of nGage’s My Reputation as one that respects and celebrates a diversity of behavioural profiles.