SharePoint 2010 gets social

If I were tweeting, or setting my Facebook or LinkedIn status, I might say: “Writing my ‘SharePoint 2010 gets social’ Knowledge Transfer article.”

Now you can accomplish the same kind of social networking in the new SharePoint 2010 environment!

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last five years, you are familiar with the social networking sites; MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yammer, etc. In fact, if Facebook were a country, its population would make it the third-largest country in the world. It has more than 300 million active members -- more than half of them active daily.

So why should you or your business care about social networking in SharePoint? Isn’t it just another time-wasting, productivity-sapping distraction for you or your employees?

Absolutely not. A few cases in point:

• Have you ever relied on user ratings or comments to find the best hotel, select a product or purchase a book?
• Have you ever found expertise or recruited talent through connections on Facebook or LinkedIn?
• Have you ever decided what to watch on YouTube based on what others are watching?
  

You can use the same technologies in your business environment. Imagine you:

• Need a presentation template. In a SharePoint search, one document comes up with four stars. You see several users like the template because it uses the new corporate colors and comes with new animations. Based on that feedback, you also choose that document. As a result, the document is ranked even higher in the next search.
• Need someone in your company with web design skills and marketing experience to work on your project. You search “web design,” and find three people who list that skill in their SharePoint profile, one of them with marketing experience. Voila!
• Need web-site screen shots for a proposal you’re making. On your SharePoint Note Board, a colleague has posted several JPEGs of web sites she created. Your colleague’s IM status is “available,” so you just IM her, and she directs you to the files you need.
  

While you’ll have to wait until late spring for it, SharePoint 2010 has added other exciting new features that mimic many of the features on Facebook and Twitter, such as:

• Micro-blogging (tweets or Facebook status messages).
  
• Note Board (Facebook wall).
  
• User tagging.
  
• User ratings.
  
• Greatly improved blogs and wiki experience.
  
  
• New My Site features include:
  
  • A personal blog site.
    
  • Micro-blog.
    
  • Tag Cloud.
    
  • Organization Org Chart / Directory.
    
  • RSS feeds.
    
  • Content list of items you have tagged.
    
  • People Search.
    
  • Colleague Tracking

Many of my clients have been clamoring for these features for quite some time. Many are using Facebook, LinkedIn and others to conduct business, because these features are not available in business software.

The business concern has been that proprietary information can “leak” this way, or that security and access cannot be as controlled as they are within your firewall. But SharePoint 2010 can provide the value you need, all behind your firewall.

Bottom line: Enterprise social networking can help users find two very important assets in the organization: Data and expertise. And with users’ unique My Sites, it can unite a diverse organization within a sort of digital “cubical.”

Keep up with SharePoint 2010 developments with your C/D/H consultant, catch our upcoming blogs and seminars about SharePoint 2010, and be sure to visit us at SharePoint Saturday on March 13 in Ann Arbor.