SharePoint 2010 : Get Started with Social Features

Figure 1. Selecting My Profile or My Site from the menu.

If the My Site link does not appear, it could be one of two reasons: Either you are working on a site that has SPF only (and not SharePoint Server) or the site manager disabled the option to have a personal site. However, the My Profile link should appear if your user account has a profile associated with it. If it doesn’t, you must either click on the My Site link (to create a profile) if it is available or contact the administrator to find out why you don’t have a profile.

Clicking the My Profile link opens your profile page. By default, clicking the My Site option does not create a personal site for you but instead opens the social networking home page, shown in Figure 2. This page allows you to navigate to your personal site and to other social networking pages.

Figure 2. The social networking home page.

The following sections describe how to perform some of the most common social networking tasks.

Set Your Status to Let Others Know What You Are Doing

You use your status to tell other people what you are doing. This is similar to status updates in social networking Internet sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can write a small description of what is on your mind or what you are doing, and people in your social network who are tracking your status can see on their newsfeed that you have a new status.

To set your status, navigate to the My Profile page by either clicking the My Profile link from the [your name] drop-down menu (refer to Figure1) or by clicking the My Profile link at the top of the social networking home page (refer to Figure 2). You then see a page with your picture and a speech bubble with What’s Happening? coming out of the picture, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Setting your status in the My Profile area.

Click on the What’s Happening text and type the status you want to change to. Press Enter.

Specify Your Colleagues

You might want to specify with whom you are working. This information helps SharePoint track for you what they are doing and helps you share information with them.

To specify your colleagues, open the My Profile page as explained earlier in this chapter, and then click the Colleagues tab. In this tab you can add, modify, or remove your colleagues, as well as group them in different ways (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. The Colleagues tab enables you to add, modify, remove, and group colleagues.

Clicking Add Colleagues opens a dialog that allows you to manually select people from the company address book and mark them as colleagues in the Add Colleagues dialog (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Adding coworkers to your social network by using the Add Colleagues dialog.

View Where You Are in the Organization Hierarchy

You might want to see the organization hierarchy in order to see who is managing whom in the company. To view where you are in the hierarchy, open the My Profile page as described earlier and switch to the Organization tab. How this tab looks depends on whether you have Microsoft Silverlight installed on your client machine. Figures 6 and 7 show the different looks for this page.

Figure 6. The Organization tab, showing the people in the hierarchy as a collapsible tree, without Silverlight.

Figure 7. The Organization tab, showing the people in the hierarchy as a collapsible tree, using Silverlight.

Both Figures 6 and 7 show the organization hierarchy. In Figure 6, without Microsoft Silverlight, you can see the hierarchy with Jane Doe (the current user) highlighted. You can see that Jane reports to Olivia and has three people (Jake Smith, John Doe, and John Smith) reporting to her. Two of them in turn have other people reporting to them; for example, Jill reports to Jack Smith. To see who reports to John Doe, you must expand the view by clicking on the arrow next to his name. Clicking on a name in the view selects the person and exposes a button to open the profile page for that user, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Selecting a person in the Organization tab to see his profile.

The Silverlight version of this window shows the same structure but with a richer interface. It shows people’s pictures (or blank pictures, if those people haven’t updates their profiles to have pictures) and in boxes showing who reports to whom. You can see in Figure 7 that Jane reports to Olivia and manages Jack Smith, John Smith, and John Doe. If you click Jack Smith, Silverlight moves the two Johns to the side and shows that Jack manages Jill (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. Selecting a person in the Organization tab, using Silverlight, to see who he is managing.

To view a person’s profile, simply click that person’s name.