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Note: Microsoft is buying Yammer and upgrading social features in SharePoint 2013, but NewsGator continues to find room to make itself useful.
Questions About Microsoft's Acquisition of Yammer (click image for larger view and for slideshow) Microsoft is buying Yammer, and getting ready to ship improved social software of its own in SharePoint 2013. But NewsGator is still running few steps ahead of that wave.
NewsGator is releasing NewsGator Social Sites 3.0 this week and plans to follow with a beta version targeting SharePoint 2013 in another week or so. Social Sites is an enterprise social networking product that runs on top of SharePoint and it's long been known for rounding out the relatively limited social networking capabilities Microsoft itself provides. Now, NewsGator is adjusting its strategy in reaction to Microsoft's pending acquisition of Yammer and social software advances in the forthcoming SharePoint 2013.
In the long run, NewsGator plans to shift its focus to providing more focused business applications, such as those for vertical industries, that run on top of the social software foundation. For now, there are still gaps in the foundation to shore up. SharePoint is finally ready to deliver a competitive activity stream, with tagging and @mentions and document previews. So NewsGator is moving on to offer an option called Lookout for managing multiple side-by-side feeds.
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"Lookout lets users create their own views based on what's important to them," said Brian Kellner, executive vice president for development and product management. Selected feeds, which might be filtered to...