Two weeks ago I wrote an article questioning whether it’s time for new office tools. If you remember, I offered to trade in all my unused Microsoft Office apps for the features that I really need.

Last week a group of AMR Research analysts visited a client in the Midwest. The meeting opened with the CIO showing a new collaborative application his team had developed in house. It was a combination of Facebook, Twitter, and social communities. In the short time it’s been available, it’s widely used by the chairman and the executive team. It’s quickly percolating down through the rest of the organization.

In some ways, you can think of this as a layer that sits above Office and Outlook. These tools can plug into the collaborative schema. Ideally, you could swap them out for other tools (Google Apps, for example) while preserving the enterprise layer.

I’ve been looking at tools like this for a while. One company on the top of my radar, NewsGator, has built an interesting set of applications on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint. As you know, SharePoint has emerged as the world’s most popular portal. NewsGators’s software has been installed at more than 150 customers, and it currently supports more than one million employees. Most of the customers are brand names in banking, life sciences, high tech, professional services, and media. Companies are deploying it to improve corporate communications, make SharePoint more user friendly, and design new social computing applications.

The wisdom of experts meets the wisdom of crowds

One new feature is the Knowledge Explorer. You search on a topic and click on a cloud tag. This allows you to find co-workers that are most knowledgeable about that tag. This leads to finding additional resources and related content too. It’s sort of like leveraging the “wisdom of experts.”

These screen shots should give you an idea of some of the functionality. You can see that it’s similar to salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange.

Microsoft is scheduled to launch the beta version of SharePoint 14 in Q4 CY09, with general delivery planned for 1H CY10. Although it’s unclear whether or not the company will ultimately offer something similar to NewsGator (or just buy the Denver-based company), the NewsGator people point to their tight relationship with the Office giant: It’s a Microsoft “depth-managed partner,” which is the highest tier in the Microsoft ecosystem, and it’s also part of the Technical Adoption Program (TAP). NewsGator has also been testing parts of the new SharePoint release, and its software deploys as web parts in the Microsoft portal. As the company pointed out, “We’re built in, not bolted on.”

Battling prediction addiction

When I first met the NewsGator team last year, I couldn’t help but ask if they had looked at adding software to support prediction markets. This combination would represent the melding of wisdom of experts with the wisdom of crowds. If you attended our executive conference last fall, you’ll remember this has been a fixation of mine for a while now. A prediction market allows people to wager on the outcome of a project or product, not unlike betting that a stock would rise or fall. For example, Steve Ballmer might want to use it internally to see if employees think SharePoint 14 will ship on time.

I’ve been tracking Crowdcast, a new entry in this market. We have a call set up for Wednesday afternoon. I’m curious as to how easy it might be to integrate Crowdcast with NewsGator. I’ve also told my CIO friend that he needs to have his development team look at incorporating some of the functionality from NewsGator and Crowdcast into future releases of his collaboration suite.

What do you think?

For CIOs to succeed with building a collaboration suite, what role do we need Microsoft or Google to play in providing next-generation Office tools? And if we can build the technology ourselves, why do we need either of these companies?

As always, I welcome your feedback and ideas—brichardson@amrresearch.com. I also welcome your comments on my blog.