Awareness Unveils Integration With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

WALTHAM, MA--(Marketwire - June 9, 2008) - Highlighting one of the major features of its Summer 2008 release, Awareness, Inc. today unveiled platform integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This integration, developed by working with Microsoft, brings the value of social media to Microsoft Office SharePoint Products and Technologies and enables users to directly engage with Awareness-powered, external-facing Web 2.0 communities.

Increasingly, many companies are turning to social media as a means to participate in more transparent conversations with customers, prospects, and partners. The scalable and searchable backend of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 -- ideal for broad information-sharing within an enterprise -- combined with Awareness' expertise in powering social media communities, gives companies an effective way to tie their internal collaboration closely to their external Web communities.

This strategic relationship between Awareness and Microsoft is valuable for users that "live" in Microsoft Office SharePoint Products and Technologies and need to engage with groups outside the enterprise, such as customers, partners, prospects, etc. By integrating internal-facing environments with social networking participation points from external-facing Web 2.0 communities, it becomes much easier to pull valuable information into the enterprise where people can use it.

"This integration with Awareness communities extends the value of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, allowing users to work in a much more social and collaborative way," said Deb Bannon, senior product manager for Microsoft's SharePoint Server Partner Group. "Companies are increasingly seeking to combine their internal collaboration with customer-facing social media and social networking and this strategic relationship with Awareness will allow them to do just that."

As part of its broader widget strategy and integration with other third party offerings such as Facebook, Awareness has packaged its inventory of Web 2.0 widgets to operate as web parts. When Awareness creates a Web 2.0 community for an organization, it can provide the SharePoint Products and Technologies administrators with a set of customizable web parts that they can add to their sites. These web parts allow users to monitor community content (e.g., recent posts, most popular posts), contribute content (e.g., create a post, start or edit a wiki, start or respond to a discussion, etc.), display user details and status, search content, and monitor community participation metrics directly from within SharePoint Products and Technologies.

The integration makes possible the following features within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0:

-- Dashboard of Awareness community activity;

-- Integration with Microsoft identity management (Single Sign-On) allows for a seamless user experience;

-- Integrated search of SharePoint Products and Technologies and Awareness content;

-- Access to Awareness community social networking functionalities, including people lists, updateable and customizable status and profile; and

-- Enhanced user-generated content functionality, including voting and commenting on content.

"Our work with Microsoft extends the options for our customers to broadly gather, organize, and distribute content through the power of social media," said John Bruce, CEO, Awareness. "Now organizations can integrate their Awareness-powered Web 2.0 communities with SharePoint Products and Technologies, Facebook, and literally any website through our widgets and APIs. This integration is a natural step in extending the use of our platform into another environment to further facilitate and enhance social media for the enterprise."

About Awareness

Awareness helps companies build and operate branded Web 2.0 communities. These online communities let customers, prospects, employees and partners connect with each other and share content. At the core of the Awareness solution is an on-demand social media platform that combines the full range of Web 2.0 technologies -- blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social networking, podcasts, RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, etc. -- with security, control, and content moderation. Awareness builds these features into complete communities for companies, or customers use the Awareness API and widgets to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their own web properties. Major corporations such as McDonald's, Kodak, the New York Times Company, Northwestern Mutual and Procter & Gamble use Awareness to build brand loyalty, generate revenue, drive new forms of marketing, improve collaboration, encourage knowledge-sharing and build a "corporate memory." Find out more at http://www.awarenessnetworks.com.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

Contact Information: Media Contacts: For Awareness Jennifer Gazin or Virginia Zimpel 415.625.8555 awareness(at)launchsquad(dot)com Or: Eric Schurr 781-622-2388 eric.schurr(at)awarenessnetworks(dot)com