Government and for-profit organizations are challenged by the conflicting need to facilitate social networking, data sharing and communication while maintaining privacy and security through firewalls and intranets. Looking at some of the key capabilities of new networking technologies such as wikis, video and multimedia information sharing, and podcasting, Dean Halstead maps SharePoint's capabilities to typical government data sharing and collaboration needs in this Gov 2.0 presentation.

Halstead extends the social networking paradigm to include using SharePoint’s tools for database access, data aggregation and data mining. His goal is to inspire government agencies to exploit SharePoint’s ability to leverage all available data to complete their tasks, including working with other government and non-governmental organizations.

Halstead describes the successful application of SharePoint in online samples that demonstrate various aspects of SharePoint including finding and connecting with resources and friends, creating communities of practice, collaborating across organizations with shared responsibility, and aggregating and drilling down into data.

In the future, Halstead foresees SharePoint support for podcasts with video uploads that provide time-critical information and support training.