Social media is hot, and online game playing is one of the highest growth areas on this front today and going forward. Now many top businesses are working to apply both collaboration and gamification not only to customer-facing initiatives, but also within their own organizations.

Badgeville is providing such organizations with the tools to help make that happen. And today, the company announced the availability of its Microsoft SharePoint connector.

Chris Lynch, Badgeville’s director of product marketing, tells TechZone360 that the company’s Microsoft SharePoint connector identifies the most high value behaviors of users in SharePoint environments. That behavior could include document management (create, contribute); creating, editing, or contributing to a wiki page; starting or participating in a discussion thread; posting or responding to a blog; posting a comment on content (docs, wikis, blogs, discussion threads); viewing pages; rating content; voting on content; liking content; and/or tagging content.

That way, organizations can keep tabs on who is using the Microsoft collaboration tool for what, and managers within those businesses can recognize employees that best contribute to such collaborative efforts and in the process encourage future behavior along these lines.

For example, take the sales staff. Sales people traditionally work within their own silos, says Lynch. If they do collaborate, he adds, they tend to do it via e-mail with a set group of people. But the larger organizations could probably benefit more from sales meetings if sales people shared their notes within a SharePoint wiki. That way, even far-flung employees can share information about customers and prospects, potentially resulting in more sales.

Microsoft SharePoint connector is part of Badgeville’s larger solution, which is called The Behavior Platform. This solution helps identify, measure and reward any type of behavior on a website, and within popular CRM and collaboration tools such as Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Yammer, among others. Lynch says the use of Badgeville’s platform can help organizations gain more value from the CRM and collaboration tools in which they’ve already invested.

Speaking of investments, Badgeville just recently closed a C series round of funding, which brought in $25 million, bringing its funding to date to $40 million. Lynch says that; Badgeville’s 300 percent revenue growth; and, especially, the fact that the 20-month-old company’s platform is already in use at such major companies as Dell, Deloitte, eBay, Samsung, and Universal Music, indicate that gamification is becoming a very accepted and sustainable business concept.

Gartner predicts 70 percent of the top 2,000 global organizations will have at least one gamified app by 2014. And M2 Research forecasts this space will be worth $2.8 billion by 2016.