Gaming SharePoint Adoption

User-behavior influencer and gamification-solution provider Badgeville today announced its Microsoft SharePoint connector, Badgeville for SharePoint. The solution is directly aimed at increasing employee engagement with SharePoint.

"SharePoint has widespread adoption but there's a common theme--you ask customers if they're happy with SharePoint, they say 'no, I would love to drive adoption to it a lot more.' So we had enough client demand that we decided to make SharePoint a priority," said Kevin Akeroyd, VP of field operations at Badgeville.

"People have invested heavily in collaboration software, social software, learning management systems and CRM systems, and half the use cases are us employing this engagement layer," Akeroyd said. Examples of use cases for Badgeville's gamification/user reward solutions include using its gamification and behavior platform to get IBM employees to use training software, and motivating Lipitor users to take their medicine.

"We're so bullish on SharePoint--it's got such an install base," Akeroyd said. Badgeville for SharePoint was created to measure, influence, and reward key user behaviors inside SharePoint to improve knowledge sharing, document management, and social collaboration.

The SharePoint use case can vary, he said, depending on how SharePoint is used in an organization, whether for file sharing, content management, or social computing and collaboration."We put the gamification elements inside a Web Part, and you can configure which of these behaviors and how much" to reward.

"We will track the before, see what's being used. Then we turn on the program. We see what's working. It's iterative." Rewards can include reputation enhancements, voting power, access to content. "We do reward and reputation very well. Then we amplify social. When you put the three together, it's a powerful engagement platform."

"If I'm a SharePoint user and it's all about social, I'm going to reward it heavily. If I'm old school and I see SharePoint as content management, I'm going to reward that. We can help them make that decision. Some people might want leader boards, showcases, activity streams, things users unlock, profiles. It's very complete but flexible."

The Badgeville behavior platform was created to help businesses drive customer-facing or employee-facing engagement in their enterprise systems. Users include such verticals as financial services, telecos, education, media, and consumer electronics. Since the company launced in 2010, he said, "about half the market was 80 percent consumer facing, 20 percent employee facing. Now it's gone 50/50. "

Badgeville for SharePoint is priced by a flat fee based on the size of the community (number of employees or number of customers) and how many apps or touch points it's deployed across. To learn more, see the Badgeville website.