Microsoft has its own perspective over social computing in enterprise environments, a perspective that involves collaboration around various forms of information from documents to projects, but in the context of a framework built to respect business management and IT governance requirements. In June at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, the Redmond company unveiled an online Social Computing resource aimed for enterprise customers. The Microsoft Enterprise Social Computing mini-site is powered by Office SharePoint 2007 and is designed to illustrate just what the technology is capable of.

“At #e2conf (tag name for Enterprise 2.0 Conference), we announced a new Microsoft mini-site dedicated to enterprise social computing. It’s running on the sharepoint.microsoft.com environment that hosts the primary SharePoint marketing site. On this social site, you will find content about using the social power of SharePoint to help your organization to collaborate and communicate. Plus, the site has a fresh new design and uses the blog feature that is built into SharePoint,” stated Dave Pae, SharePoint technical product manager.

The software giant underlined that social computing was the equivalent of Web 2.0 for businesses, namely Enterprise 2.0, what the company referred to as the natural evolution of collaboration, evolution that refocused from information to the people in an enterprise. Via the Enterprise Social Computing website Microsoft is offering companies a chance to explore the benefits of social computing, to access demos and success stories, to interact with the community and partners as well as leverage resources offered by the company.

“Microsoft delivers social computing technologies through core products in our enterprise software portfolio, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, the Microsoft Office system, and Windows Server. Continuous investment in the future of these platforms is central to the Microsoft mission and business strategy. Input from customers on both the enterprise and consumer sides of the global Microsoft business inform the product roadmap for social computing, ensuring that capabilities constantly evolve to meet the needs of information workers, business leaders, IT managers, and consumers,” the software giant stated in the “Social Computing in the Enterprise” white paper.