Microsoft has developed a corporate Facebook

As it became known , in the depths of the research division of Microsoft Office Labs matured a prototype of the social networking site Facebook-like. About the project under the working title TownSquare was told by the General Manager of Office Labs at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. A new social network is positioned as an intracorporate work tool for communicating company employees. The working prototype is being tested inside Microsoft from January, and sales of the product bundled with SharePoint may begin soon.

Developers from Microsoft are clearly inspired by the example of Facebook, as can be seen from the design.



Interestingly, no one advertised the social network to Microsoft: in January, only a hundred selected received invites, but since then the information has spread among the rest on the basis of viral marketing. To date, 8,000 employees have registered with the corporate social network, and the daily audience is about 700 people. In the future, Microsoft intends to offer Townsquare to corporate customers as part of a suite of office workflow software.
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Of course, the system is tightly integrated with corporate SharePoint and MS Office systems. Users can log in to a social network from a remote computer, publish photos and other content, as well as adjust the rules for accessing each of their documents and receive RSS messages if a document is edited by another user. The general manager of Office Labs said that, thanks to TownSquare, tracking changes in colleagues' documents has become an unusually popular activity among Microsoft employees.