When Jason Harrison joined global communications firm Universal McCann as its CIO in 2006, he was asked by the company’s executives to find a way to better connect the 3,000 employees spread out across more than 60 locations around the world. The usual tools, mainly email and telephone, hadn’t yielded the results the company wanted in terms of building a common company culture.
The company’s IT infrastructure was heavily Microsoft-based, with the 2003 version of SharePoint already installed and the 2007 SharePoint on the way. With the latter, Harrison knew that Microsoft had added social software capabilities to SharePoint, including MySites, social networking profiles for the enterprise.
Harrison decided to start with social networking, and has since built a social network mixing the built-in social tools of the SharePoint platform with technology from NewsGator, a vendor that offers enterprise Real Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology that streams relevant information to employees over portals such as corporate intranets. In this case, such information is centered around industry news and deals with Universal McCann’s clients, which include large corporations such as Sony, Johnson & Johnson and Exxon Mobile.
“We wanted everyone to feel one culture and one set of objectives,” Harrison says. “Because we’re so distributed, we had to build a common social fabric virtually.”
Tags: , business news, Firm builds a social network with SharePoint, mynews, mysites, myway, news, news gator, NewsGator RSS, rss feed, social network
