We often get this question. When we started developing Beezy (almost 3 years ago), there were already several Enterprise Social Networking tools for SharePoint on the market. So why bother to create yet another? Beezy is unique in 2 ways: Beezy offers SIMPLICITY and EXTENSIBILITY. And this is exactly what our customers are asking for.

SIMPLICITY

Beezy as a product was born out of customer’s observation. While employees started to scream for social tools to communicate and collaborate more efficiently in their workplace, a robust and powerful platform like SharePoint was showing poor levels of adoption and employee engagement.

Beezy’s objective was to solve this problem. Beezy increased adoption and employee engagement by focusing on two key objectives:

• Offer a consumer-like user experience: Getting people to work in new ways is not an easy task. Enterprise 2.0 tools offer a lot of advantages, but also require new behaviours and cultural change. This is not a technology issue, but it is about people. What technology can (and must) do is to offer a great user experience that mimics and extends the social tools that people have already adopted in their personal life (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter). Only a seamless UI can make the cultural changes happen faster and smoothly, whilst ensuring high levels of adoption and efficiency.
• Filter SharePoint’s complexity: Employees may have complex tasks to achieve in their daily job but they need simple tools. IT platforms like SharePoint are by definition complex systems. So that’s precisely Beezy’s second crucial challenge; to hide SharePoint’s complexity. While reusing SharePoint native objects and content, Beezy’s interface is simple and minimalistic. Advanced features are only delivered upon request, when users need them by default in a cluttered user interface.

In our blog of 18 September we already said that despite the release of SharePoint 2013 our two core objectives remain unchanged. Consumer social services have evolved fast enough to again be ahead of the out-of-the-box functionality and at the same time, the User Experience of such a big platform has not realistically improved despite its renewed “Metro” design.

EXTENSIBILITY

Many corporate intranets are pretty good in communicating information. However when it comes to providing social collaboration capabilities, many intranets fall short. Executives are looking for a way to improve their existing intranet with an enterprise social networking tool. They want to bring social collaboration to every corner of the Intranet. How do you build an intranet with social at heart while leveraging the investment in the existing intranet and the underlying SharePoint platform?

Fort this matter the enterprise social tool has to able be integrated and customized into their existing SharePoint intranet. Beezy is unique when it comes to these customization and integration capabilities. Below you see a screenshot of a social intranet that has Beezy integrated in every corner of the intranet. We have many real world examples. Fill in the form below so we can share them with you.

Beezy comes with more than 25 webparts that can be added and integrated to any particular page of SharePoint.

Our customers also use Beezy´s RESTful API to integrate their applications with Beezy consuming or feeding the information contained in the Beezy database. From a technology point of view, the API has been built as a REST service on top of the Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) protocol. This fact ensures ease of use regardless of the technology or language our customers are using.

Conclusion

Beezy keeps laser focused in its core objectives: bring to organizations the most advanced social features through an unmatched user experience that filters SharePoint 2013 inherent complexity.

Today’s leading companies are building their next generation of Intranets where Enterprise Social Networks are not a side tool anymore. Social is now at the heart of their communication and collaboration unified strategy.

The combination of a robust platform like SharePoint with a flexible and extensible product like Beezy offers a unique opportunity for organizations to easily deploy an integrated Social Intranet while leveraging their investment in the new platform version roll-out.