More than  1300 staff at Australian property group Stockland are learning to get social with the implementation of Newsgator Social Sites 2010 as part of a new SharePoint 2010 intranet.

Emily Staresina, intranet and usability consultant within the Stockland Information Technology Group, said the new intranet was developed to answer the collaborative needs for knowledge sharing and communication at the company.

Just don’t call it “FaceBook for Your Company.” That’s a big turnoff to many, according to Staresina. Stockland has instead come up with the term “Circles” which it uses to describe the Newsgator Online Communities that are defined centrally within the company

In January 2011 Stockland deployed a new SharePoint 20117 intranet.

“During the course of delivering that version of intranet we came across a number of collaborative needs around knowledge and communication,” said Staresina

Stockland to keep the first generation of its internet focussed on the design and information architecture, and leave the social platform for the next iteration.

“Social was already happening in Stockland around pockets, not surprisingly we had people using Yammer, Confluence and other people using Wordpress. We didn’t want it to grow out of control and all our information be externally hosted

“We wanted to streamline this and have similar approach, had opportunity to learn from how people were using these external tools

Stockland already had a roadmap to upgrade the intranet to SharePoint 2010, which was accomplished from July to December 2011 in parallel with the Newsgator deployment by solution provider Nsynergy.

The intranet is not integrated with the Objective EDRMS that the company has been deploying since 2009. Fileshares are still being used and some users are beginning to upload documents to Newsgator.

Since the launch in December 2011 about a quarter of Stockland staff have completed their Newsgator profiles, just short of the initial aim of 500 .

“Adoption is a fulltime job,” said Staresina. “Forget if you build it they will come.”

Usage is being driven via 15 pilot groups established across Stockland’s diverse range of employees including sales and marketing professionals, architects, designers and accountants.

Social media features initially rolled out with the first deployment of Newsgator include the use of employee profiles, ability to follow colleagues’ activity streams and the freedom to explore different “Circles”.

These Circles, or Online Communities, are being centrally managed and controlled, and their number has doubled since the initial deployment.

Plans for the future of Newsgator at Stockland include embedding collaboration into the company’s culture, allowing tools for staff recognition and looking at integrating mobile devices and multimedia.

JB Holston, President and CEO, NewsGator Technologies, said “Social business applications are increasingly a part of enterprise infrastructure. The old way was to have a separate EDRMS but the new way is to associate social interactivity.

“One of the real benefits is rich profiles that get richer over time, if the value of enterprise social is being able to find someone who can answer something faster or finding an expert more quickly, the system can help you do that to the degree that the system knows more about that individual. Where our system works is being able to track interactivity and then come up with suggested connections to content and contacts.

“Ultimately it depends on the quality of the profile. Historically you would go into an organisation on Day One and fill out your profile on Active Directory then never revisit  it again, so it became pretty irrelevant within about an hour. With these systems you can continually enhance that profile by virtue of folk’s tacit interactivity.”