A connected workforce is vital to multinational corporations that are driven by collaboration and innovation, but locating people with particular expertise or contacts can be difficult within large enterprises. SONAR Dashboard enables users to connect and collaborate across boundaries of geography, department and function to increase innovation and organizational effectiveness.

SONAR Dashboard provides business-focused social networking functionality free of distracting consumer features and is contained within the corporate firewall to ensure no sensitive information is leaked. Auto-population allows user organisations to gain immediate value because employees do not need to spend time completing and maintaining profiles.

Profiles, search and visualisation

SONAR Dashboard provides each employee with a personal profile accessed through a web browser. Users can tap straight into the experts they need through a simple search interface. Intuitive visualisations of the social networks within an organisation enable employees to navigate through their connections and beyond. Pathways through social networks are displayed for users to reach the people they need and expand their social network.

Status updates and feed

SONAR Dashboard contains a status update feature and activity feed to increase users’ ambient awareness of activity in their network. The status invites employees to respond to the question “What are you working on right now?” and their answers are fed into the feed for others to read. The feed also includes new contacts and themes shared within the network, ensuring users are up to date with the activities of their peers.

Automatic updating

Automation is critical to enterprise social computing. Employees are less inclined to update profiles at work in comparison to consumer social networking. SONAR Dashboard is connected to SONAR Server, which analyses a company’s email and documents to discover the key themes and relationships hidden in electronic information. From this information it populates profiles which users can manage and others can search for relevant expertise.

Themes and contacts

SONAR Dashboard groups information into themes and contacts to reflect the core elements of information flow in the workplace. Themes are topics of interest. They might be projects, customers or areas of expertise – subjects and ideas people are communicating about. Contacts are the people users share information with. They might be team mates, other employees or contacts in outside organisations.

Powered by SONAR Server

SONAR Dashboard is powered by SONAR Server, which identifies the social networks, information flows and themes within electronic information such as email, documents and IM. SONAR Server provides enterprise-class security, privacy and integration.