Social Networking and SharePoint 2007

May 27, 2008

On May 14, 2008, CIO.com published an article about Understanding Microsoft SharePoint in a Web 2.0 World.

Obviously, Social networking is a significant goal of Web 2.0 and has received a lot of attention over the recent past with the hope of improving worker productivity by making available enhanced online access to people, skills, knowledge and other resources. As Wikipedia says, “Social Networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society”. Social networking software typically allow users to build an online profile through which they can share information about themselves and thus leads to the building of online communities with shared interests and/or activities.

SharePoint 2007 uses the concept of individual, customizable user profiles to provide users with a means of publishing information about themselves. These user profiles can combine information from the organizational directory service such as LDAP or a Human Resource application.

SharePoint provides individual sites (My Sites) for each user that provides personnel information as well as private and public views of content. Visitors to an individual’s My Site can see contact information, presence information, and organizational hierarchy information. My Sites also enables users to display information about their skills, colleagues and other social information.

SharePoint uses the notion of Colleagues, where colleagues can be friends or co-workers or members of the same team, who are related to an individual by means of their profile. The list of colleagues is built by mining multiple sources of information and is directly influenced by the organizational hierarchy. A user can also manually add or remove colleagues from their colleagues web part.

The colleague tracker web part can track changes to the profiles of a users colleagues, for example tracking such things as changes to a blog, new or modified documents, and changes to user profile properties, etc.

The Memberships web part let users see the lists and sites that they are members of.

The In Common With web part shows a visitor summary information relating to memberships, colleagues and managers that the visitor has in common with the owner of that My Site.

The Organization Hierarchy web part on My Profile page shows the user’s manager, peers (others who report to the user’s manager) and any direct reports of that user.

In association with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information is made available that indicates online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information.

The People Search function allows users to find people or skills by means of a search interface that returns search results based on social distance (an ordering of results based on colleague relationships i.e. first your colleagues will appear, then their colleagues and then everyone else).

Microsoft has also provided several Role Based Templates for My Sites to cater to the unique needs and requirements of different roles in an organization.

For more information, see the following white paper from Microsoft: Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

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