Microsoft TownSquare

While browsing the web over the weekend, I happened to stumble across information regarding Microsoft TownSquare (shown in picture); a Facebook-type social networking tool built on top of SharePoint 2007 that is being used within Microsoft by about 8000 employees since January 2008.

TownSquare was built by a prototyping group within Microsoft called Office Labs that drives innovation in some Office Products. Bram Paperman, Program Manager for Office Labs in the U.S. mentions that the idea for TownSquare was born out of the SharePoint Team at Microsoft wanting to examine what it would be like to be able to create a social networking news feed within the Enterprise. While SharePoint 2007 does provide RSS feed capability at a site level, there was no way to seamlessly surface new content from multiple sites.

TownSquare allowed Microsoft employees to toggle users in and out of the system; implying the process of aggregation was more focussed. After targeting other users, Microsoft employees could then track targeted user interaction with the SharePoint system - notifications would be sent out the moment a targeted user added or updated content.

I thought this was a really cool idea.