What can you do with Social Office?

Social Office gives you the social collaboration features you need to do virtual teamwork. You can coordinate calendars and schedules, write shared blog entries, work together on documents, discuss issues in forums, document everything in a wiki, and more. The underlying theme is that all discussion and collaboration is kept with the asset. What does this mean? It means that the asset, whether that be a document, a thread, a blog entry, or a wiki article is the star around which all of the discussion and collaboration orbits.

Trying to collaborate on assets through email or server shares works up to a certain point—but then it fails because it's a backwards way of doing the work. The asset in that scenario becomes secondary, and the "wrapper"—email or the share—becomes the primary target of the work. So instead of concentrating on the asset which the team is trying to produce, the focus turns to the wrapper. In the case of a shared folder, you might manually rename documents according to a numbering scheme so everyone can tell which is the latest—that is, until someone forgets to do so, or until someone accidentally overwrites the latest document. In the case of email, users try to navigate huge threads while passing an asset back and forth—until someone forgets to "reply all" or until someone starts a new thread (and maybe forgets to put the whole list on the thread). Working in the mediums of shared folders or email puts the focus on working with the wrapper, not the asset. And so what happens is the asset gets lost because they're forced to focus on the wrapper instead of the asset. With Social Office, you will be free to concentrate on their assets—the system gets out of your way so that it's a simple matter for your team to work together.