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."

Soliciting opinion

Harrison first went to work seeing if social networking really had a shot of taking off at Universal McCann. He had read case studies of other companies trying to implement a "Facebook for the enterprise" and learned many of those attempts failed as employees failed to update profiles and the social network went stale. "We needed an architecture for content to flow in automatically, and RSS seemed like the best way to do that," he said.

Social Sites is NewsGator's social networking profile technology; it works on top of SharePoint. It only requires users to enter a little bit of basic information (such as name, title and most high-level work interests), and Social Sites does the rest, feeding users relevant information and allowing them to tag pieces of content they find interesting or want to share with colleagues.

Harrison says he realized early on that people wouldn't want to share the type of personal information they do on Facebook on a corporate intranet. "We needed something self-perpetuating that fed relevant [corporate] information in," Harrison says. "We weren't going to try to recreate Facebook internally."