Bamboo Solutions, the leading provider of solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, today unveils Community Central for SharePoint, a turnkey application designed to enhance social collaboration within the enterprise. By extending SharePoint’s out-of-the-box social collaboration capabilities, Community Central delivers a powerful SharePoint-based social solution which can compete with industry-leading platforms. Community Central for SharePoint allows organizations to seamlessly add the most desirable, feature-rich tools users expect from today’s popular consumer social platforms to their SharePoint environment. The enhanced social interactions made possible by Community Central leverage the dependably secure enterprise infrastructure of SharePoint that organizations require.

With Community Central’s user-friendly blogging and forum management capabilities, organizations can capture the knowledge and expertise of their user base. The best-in-class discussion boards, blogs, and community administration tools available with Community Central’s social solution allows organizations to directly engage with employees and customers.

By extending the out-of-the-box social collaboration features inherent within the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform, with Community Central, organizations can fundamentally change the way they manage and share information, including:

• Quickly create an interactive e-learning site for the sharing of expert information both internally and externally;
• Aggregate “Cornerstone Content,” where all content related to a specific topic is pulled together in one place;
• Build online communities with “Birds-of-a-Feather” private discussions;
• Create an internal/external interactive knowledge area for accessing knowledge from the experts;
• Provide a social collaboration environment between vendors and customers for product announcements, support, and services; and
• Allow executives to more easily communicate their vision, policies, and changes throughout the organization.

“We developed these capabilities after identifying the need for more robust community sites, discussion boards, and search capabilities, boosting our own productivity by working smarter and finding answers faster,” said Trang Husebo, Senior Product Manager at Bamboo Solutions. “With key improvements to how users find information, Community Central is a critical enterprise solution to drive collaboration and innovation within an organization. And with deployment complete in just a matter of hours, Community Central provides organizations with a speedy return on their investment.”

By incorporating standalone Bamboo components such as Discussion Board Plus and Bamboo Rating Column, Community Central illustrates Bamboo’s “solution frameworks” architecture wherein individual components from Bamboo’s powerful library of 70+ components can be configured as a complete solution to meet a specific business requirement. Extending the value of such solution frameworks further, Bamboo Solutions plans to integrate Community Central with other products in the portfolio to provide enterprise solutions which will help organizations achieve successful management of their communication, decisions, resources, systems, opportunities, and business processes.

Additional information and demonstrations of Community Central for SharePoint 2010 are available upon request at the Bamboo Solutions’ booth (#339) at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, taking place October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA, and at booth #32 at the European SharePoint Conference, taking place October 17-20 in Berlin, Germany.

For More Information:

• To learn more about Community Central, and to be among the first to find out about product availability, click on the “Add to Alert List”.
• For more details on Community Central and all other Bamboo Solutions products, please visit Bamboo Nation.
• Become a fan of Bamboo Solutions on Facebook
• Community Central for SharePoint will be available for purchase in mid-October, at which time a free 30-day trial will also be available.
• Follow @bamboonation on Twitter and join the conversation
• Contact a Bamboo Account Specialist at 1.877.226.2662 (toll free), +1.703.964.2002