The document is a social enterprise buyer's guide that provides information to help organizations choose the right social solution. It discusses four key areas to evaluate: information security, communication, collaboration, and business process integration. It then summarizes some social business platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem, highlighting how Sitrion excels at security, communication, collaboration capabilities, and integration with SharePoint compared to alternatives like SharePoint 2013, Yammer, and others.

1. The Social Enterprise
Buyer’s Guide
What you need to know to choose the right
social solution for your organization.

2. INTRODUCTION
At Sitrion, we help employees to get their job done better every day. In a complex enterprise world, we enable an engaged workforce to stay connected,
make smart decisions and be productive. Leveraging their investments in SAP or SharePoint, millions of users depend on us to drive innovation, discover
untapped expertise and simplify business processes. Follow us on Twitter @sitrion and at www.sitrion.com.
This guide is intended to help familiarize you with the essentials of social business platforms
so you can select the option that makes the most sense for your business—now and in the future.
Before the advent of social business applications, corporate digital communications generally
took one of two forms: two-way emails between a select group of individuals or easy-to-overlook
mass emails sent to every employee.
Social business communication is more akin to striking up a conversation in an office hallway.
It’s a spontaneous way to connect that allows end users to decide which conversations they
want to be part of and how they want to get involved. It also helps employees find experts they
can collaborate with in real-time to solve problems faster and more effectively.
As more and more companies are discovering, it’s far easier to drive employee engagement
and productivity when a social platform is in place. This is why social solutions are such powerful
innovation drivers—particularly in organizations with multiple locations. By helping people connect
more easily, they drive bigger ideas and faster, smarter decisions at every turn.
2

3. Naturally, not all social business platforms work in the same way or offer the same benefits. That’s why
this guide was created—to help you ask the right questions before you commit to a solution for your
organization. Let’s take a look at four key areas you need to focus on when evaluating your options:
1
2
3
4
INFORMATION SECURITY – Does the social platform offer the level of
data security your business requires?
COMMUNICATION – How does the solution drive engagement to
improve productivity and customer support?
COLLABORATION – How easy is it for employees to share information
and work together to power innovation?
BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGRATION – How well does the solution
link with existing processes to drive revenue?
3

4. Let’s take a brief look at some of the social business platforms you’re
likely to be considering if you operate in the Microsoft ecosystem.
SHAREPOINT® 2013
The newest SharePoint release offers a variety of new social features that are designed to
make it more up to date. SharePoint has become more useful in things like sharing content and
creating communities, but it’s still relatively weak in the way it handles profiles, expertise searches,
innovation tools and business process integration.
YAMMER®
Yammer lets you add social features to SharePoint in the cloud and makes it easy for
departments to roll out group communication capabilities without placing high demands on your
IT team. However, Yammer has limitations in important areas like security, SharePoint integration
(both on-premise and in the cloud), and collaboration capabilities.
SITRION®
Sitrion, formerly NewsGator, provides an advanced, highly integrated social platform that doesn’t
place your data at risk. The intuitive Sitrion interface makes it easy to find experts, create
communities, share knowledge, track files, collaborate with distant coworkers, integrate key
business processes and generate helpful analytics reports.
4

5. INFORMATION SECURITY
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
You need to keep any data your company stores
completely safe in order to:
5

6. Assuming security is a big concern for you, here are some of the questions you
need to answer when considering different social business platform options.
Does an on-premise or a cloud solution
make the most sense for my company?
This is a very important question because it’s all about
where your content lives. On-premise solutions keep
data on-site and safely behind your corporate firewall. If
you’re concerned about the security of the content your
employees post (particularly research, pricing, legal
analysis, proprietary details, etc.) an on-premise solution
offers you complete peace of mind. Cloud solutions
can be more affordable to implement but pose security
concerns you may not be prepared to take on—
especially if you’re in a highly regulated industry.
With Sitrion, your social solution sits on top of the
SharePoint platform, and all of your social content lives
securely on-premise behind your firewall. With other
social platforms that store information in a multi-tenant
cloud, there is far less integration with SharePoint and
no guarantee that posted information will be kept private
or secure. (It can also be difficult to take down unwanted
posts or remove old users.) Sitrion does offer cloud and
on-premise/cloud hybrid solutions if you need them,
but your information is more secure since it’s stored in a
dedicated cloud, not in a multi-tenant cloud.
Do my documents need to be in an
auditable system?
Many industries require that information be stored in a
records management system for six to eight years. With
other solutions, documents often live in two different
places—in the cloud and in SharePoint somewhere
else. If you’re using both tools together, from an IT
perspective you need to synchronize or duplicate files
if you want them in both places. Otherwise, it’s hard to
find what you need in an audit situation.
Tight integration with SharePoint makes Sitrion a
secure, auditable system that easily accommodates
any retrieval requirements you may have. Everything
is automatically synchronized and easy to archive and
retrieve. If you share documents in SharePoint, there’s
a huge benefit to having your conversations where
those documents actually live.
6

7. Will my company retain ownership of
our own content?
With Sitrion, you never give up ownership of your
own content and intellectual property. With ‘freemium’
versions of other solutions, you can lose access
and rights to content as it technically belongs to
the vendor. This presents risk to your organization.
Also, regaining control of this content may require an
expensive upgrade.
Is it easy to execute legal holds, report
abuse or remove inappropriate content?
Sitrion understands how important it is to be able to
moderate the type of content that appears on your
company’s social activity streams. It’s why we’ve
built solutions into our platform that make all of
these initiatives easy to carry out. With other social
platforms, even basic moderation can be complex
and time-consuming.
7

8. COMMUNICATION
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A social business network helps your
employees communicate better with each
other and engage more deeply with your
company. This helps your business:
8

9. Is there a way to improve my internal
communications capabilities?
Is it easy to suggest ideas and
encourage communication across
my company?
Sitrion makes it easy to suggest ideas with Idea
Stream, a tool that empowers employees to propose
new ideas to the organization, either informally or
in full-blown campaigns. Thanks to built-in forms,
reporting and controls, it’s easy to open up any idea
to coworker comments, ‘likes’ or votes.
Other solutions let you do basic cross-company
communication. If you want to drive innovation,
however, you need to bridge separate systems by
turning to a third party. To get the innovation you want,
you have to leave your SharePoint environment and go
to the cloud. It’s not easy, integrated, elegant or secure.
Sitrion is currently the only social business platform to
offer a dedicated Internal Communications solution,
allowing you to get the right message to the right
person at the right time. You can target messages to
specific groups or regions, schedule posts by time
zone or even pin messages to the top of users’ activity
streams for emphasis. You can also conduct polls,
launch forums, engage employees in spontaneous
conversations, and track and analyze engagement
across your company.
Can I adapt the look of my social
platform so it matches my brand?
Since Sitrion is completely integrated in the SharePoint
environment, you simply use SharePoint to adapt your
look and feel. Other solutions that aren’t fully integrated
with SharePoint do not allow you to do this.
9

10. Can I create knowledge bases on a
personal, group or organization-wide basis?
Can I get input from coworkers I don’t
know and flag the best answers?
This is an important question because finding experts
who can help you quickly solve real business problems
is one of the key reasons to invest in a social enterprise
platform. Unlike other solutions, Sitrion lets you clearly
indicate when a post is a question so that you can
get answers faster. In fact, as you type in a question,
the system analyzes it in real time and points you to
answers to similar questions.
Sitrion lets you build knowledge bases, add to them
and bookmark them for select individuals or groups.
Knowledge bases can be created from internal content
living inside your Intranet or external content on any
website, allowing virtually anything to become shared
knowledge across your organization. Knowledge bases
can also be tagged so they can be further leveraged as
part of internal information searches.
Other solutions do not offer knowledge bases, but
use wikis instead. You can mark things for the entire
organization, but not for individuals or groups.
Sitrion employs intelligent routing to trigger
notifications to community members who are best
suited to provide an answer. Unlike other systems,
Sitrion gives you the ability to identify the best
answers to make coworkers aware of the best
solutions. Users also have more ways to interact with
questions—by liking them, commenting on them or
attaching useful files.
10

11. COLLABORATION
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Implementing a social platform across
your business helps you share ideas and
collaborate faster so you can:
11

12. Is it easy to find experts on
particular topics?
With other systems, employees are asked to list their
areas of expertise in their user profiles. Often these
profiles are incomplete or remain unchanged for years.
This limits your ability to find the right experts when
you need them.
Sitrion user profiles are far more accurate because
employees build credentials based on their actual
activity. The engine we’ve built into our Spotlight
solution constantly reviews what’s in your profile, what
questions you’re answering, what documents you’re
submitting and so forth. This is why—if you’re looking
for help with a specific task—Sitrion is incredibly
effective at serving up individuals across your company
with precisely the skill sets and expertise you need.
Can I generate analytics that measure
success and help me drive adoption?
Sitrion’s built-in analytics let you track activity levels,
build communities and drive adoption across your
company. This way you can determine the true
business value of our solution over a period of time.
SharePoint has an SQL database that captures
information, but it does not provide out-of-the-box
social information and is fairly limited in its application.
Other solutions have an analytics platform and
dashboard, but they are quite limited and not
integrated into the SharePoint environment.
12

13. Can I involve multiple groups in a
conversation with a single post?
Sitrion makes it easy to bring together this type of
interdepartmental collaboration. With other solutions,
it’s very difficult to involve multiple groups in
conversation since each group is in a different location
and you can only target one group at a time. This
creates disparate communication threads and makes
it harder to create cross-department communities.
Does the solution reward desired
behavior or recognize user
accomplishments?
In SharePoint, you can use ‘reputations’ within a
community to reward people for their involvement
in a community. Others let you build users’ digital
reputations by praising them, but it’s all based on
peer-to-peer declarations.
Sitrion uses a spotlight capability called ‘kudos’
to determine reputation based on what users are
actually doing. When you make contributions, your
expert ranking gets a boost with digital rewards.
You can also recognize people and link their
accomplishments with real business results using
digital badges and employee awards. It’s all part of
how Sitrion increases employee productivity by making
work fun and meaningful.
13

14. BUSINESS PROCESS
INTEGRATION
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The right social solution fits seamlessly with
the way you work by integrating with your most
important infrastructure. This helps you to drive
the most possible value from your:
14

15. Can I easily track and manage my
internal communications?
Is the solution completely integrated
with my SharePoint environment?
Sitrion runs as a managed service application
on top of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or 2013. Because
it’s so closely integrated, Sitrion is the only social
networking solution built for SharePoint that offers a
single unified solution for search, security and user
profiles. This greatly facilitates deployment
and management, reducing the burden on IT.
Sitrion’s dedicated Internal Communications solution
makes it easy to track and manage employee
engagement with whatever information you post.
In addition to being able to request feedback from
employees on corporate initiatives in real time, the
solution lets you generate reports with tracking data
that shows employee engagement on an individual,
departmental, regional or company-wide basis.
15

16. Can I participate in social collaboration
directly from other programs, such as my
email client?
Another feature that’s unique to Sitrion is the ability to
integrate with Outlook, so you can engage with your
activity stream right inside your email client and keep up
with the latest news, create groups or join conversations.
You can also interact with email and calendar items
directly from your Sitrion interface or use the universal
notification toolbar to connect with social activities on any
web page. By integrating your communication activities
in this way, Sitrion saves you time and enables you to
collaborate precisely where and how you want.
Will this solution integrate with other
social platforms or my ERP software?
Most social business platforms let you integrate
other leading social networks into their stream. What’s
unique about Sitrion is that it actually takes things a
step farther by allowing you to integrate with feeds like
Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft Dynamics. Sitrion also
integrates with ERP programs from Microsoft, Oracle
or SAP. This way you never need to log into a different
system to add social interaction to your day-to-day
workflow and approval processes.
16

17. ABOUT SITRION
The Sitrion enterprise social platform integrates easily with SharePoint and your
existing ecosystem to enable social collaboration across your entire company—all
while giving you complete control over security and confidentiality.
Get in touch with Sitrion if you want to help your employees:
Interact more easily with coworkers
Share research and methodologies
Locate expert support quickly
Keep up with company developments
Stay connected on the go
Create thriving communities
For a feature-by-feature comparison of the leading social business
platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem, visit www.sitrion.com
or call us at 1-800-608-4597 for a free consultation.
www.sitrion.com | 1999 Broadway Suite 1100 | Denver, CO 80202, USA
© 2014 Sitrion
17