SAN FRANCISCO — Oct. 17, 2007 — Atlassian Software Systems Pty. Ltd., one of the top wiki providers, and NewsGator Technologies Inc., a leader in RSS technologies, have joined forces with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, creating additional Web 2.0-based community-building capacity and expanding social computing opportunities in the workplace.
“Social computing and its inclusion in SharePoint Server 2007 are changing the way businesses work and enabling organizations to harness the power of their social networks,” said Derek Burney, general manager of SharePoint at Microsoft Corp. “This has exponentially increased the communication and collaboration among employees, partners, clients and other key stakeholders. Microsoft’s relationships with Atlassian and NewsGator represent dynamic new opportunities for integrating social computing technology into a company’s business productivity infrastructure.”
Microsoft announced commitment from its partners Atlassian and NewsGator to deliver innovative solutions on the popular Office SharePoint Server 2007 product today at the fourth annual Web 2.0 Summit, which brings together intelligence, innovation and leadership of the Internet industry.
Partner Commitment
NewsGator, a leading RSS company that helps individuals and businesses improve the way they access information and communicate, today announced the general availability of NewsGator Social Sites. NewsGator Social Sites is a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware that will enhance the social computing capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows® SharePoint Services 3.0.
“Companies of all sizes are turning to SharePoint as the foundation for social computing and Enterprise 2.0,” said Dave Keller, general manager for Enterprise at NewsGator. “NewsGator Social Sites builds on this foundation and delivers the essential components for driving portal usage and widespread collaboration.”
Atlassian, with offices in Sydney, Australia, and San Francisco, develops and distributes enterprise software products including Confluence, one of the industry’s most recognized wikis. Atlassian announced that a new set of plug-ins, available today, enables bidirectional information flow between both collaboration platforms.
“Many of our customers have been asking us for months whether Confluence and SharePoint Server 2007 compete or if they can be used together,” said Atlassian CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. “We finally have an answer.”
Integrated, Flexible Tools
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a multifaceted productivity platform whose core capabilities include collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and social computing. A standout for Microsoft, SharePoint technologies had revenue exceeding $800 million for fiscal year 2007.
Not Just for Enterprises
Burney said that Microsoft’s use of social computing includes a commitment to create up to 100 next-generation business applications on the SharePoint platform by next calendar year. He also noted that the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) 2.0, a volunteer-driven initiative to develop a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools and source code, enables even novice users to create a community Web site based on SharePoint technologies. More information on the CKS is available at http://www.codeplex.com/CKS.
More information on Office SharePoint Server 2007 is available at http://office.microsoft.com/sharepoint.
About Atlassian
Atlassian Software Systems is a global company that builds lightweight software to help distributed teams collaborate. Atlassian’s affordable, enterprise software products include JIRA, one of the world’s most popular issue trackers for IT project management, and Confluence, widely recognized as the most-advanced enterprise wiki. The company has more than 8,000 customers in over 90 countries, including 30 of the world’s top 50 corporations, spanning the Fortune 1000, public enterprise, government, academic, science and technology sectors. All products are free to qualified open source and non-profit organizations. For more information, please visit us at http://www.atlassian.com.
About NewsGator
NewsGator Technologies is the world’s leading RSS company. Headquartered in Denver, Colo., NewsGator develops and markets RSS aggregation solutions for individual end users, enterprises and online content providers. Using NewsGator products and solutions, businesses and consumers can subscribe to news, information, podcasts and other relevant content more efficiently and effectively than with traditional channels. With NewsGator, users have access to RSS information via the Web, Microsoft Outlook®, mobile devices and both Windows- and Mac-based desktop clients. All NewsGator products synchronize seamlessly, enabling users to read their RSS feeds anywhere, anytime, with any device. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
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