Sharepoint 2010 : Social Networking - Engaging People

User Profile

The profile, as discussed in the preceding section, is where users can declare both their interests and expertise so that other people in the organization can make connections or just learn more about them. The more information a user chooses to share in their profile, the richer the potential social network and professional relationships he can build. Figure 1 shows an example of a user profile on a My Site. Some organizations are not comfortable allowing or encouraging users to attach personal information to their profiles. Before you encourage users to add their interests in basket weaving, rock climbing, and extreme sports, be sure to verify that you are not violating any privacy laws or norms. However, unless there are legal reasons for not including personal information in the user profile, our best advice is to go for it—allow users to add what they are comfortable sharing. Don’t make a big deal about it and don’t try to decide what types of interests are appropriate—trust that your users will know what is good to share with their work colleagues and what might best be kept private. You can also trust that the community will quickly identify if someone has shared something that is not appropriate. Social privacy norms are changing, and what might not be comfortable for a 50-something to share might be very comfortable and accepted for a 20-something. One thing we have repeatedly heard from organizations that have deployed My Sites as an “experiment” to see how users react is that one of the most valued parts of the My Site is the interest profile—people like being able to learn more about their colleagues based on their expressed interests.

Figure 1. My Site: User Profile

Status Updates and Activity Feeds

Status updates allow users to describe “what’s happening.” Status updates are not intended to be used for verbose activity descriptions, but rather quick updates of milestones or tasks that let others know what someone is working on or thinking about. Consider asking team members working on key projects to post brief status updates once or twice a day so that colleagues know where they are on tasks without having to send an e-mail or make a phone call to check in.

While status updates allow users to deliberately share a status, activity feeds monitor users’ actions so that their colleagues can see not just what they explicitly share, but what actions they have taken, such as adding tags, updating their profiles, or rating documents. By adjusting the privacy settings when you take an action monitored by the activity feed feature (for example, by selecting the Private box on a tag or note), users can control what shows up in their activity feeds. By editing the Preferences in their profiles , users can choose which types of activities they wish to monitor for others. This capability ensures that users can manage both the privacy of what they do and the information that they want to see—two important capabilities that may help eliminate user adoption barriers in your organization.

Figure 2 shows an example of some activity feeds in Sue’s sample profile. Notice how the activity feed includes a direct link to both the content that she’s tagged and the terms that she has used. Clicking the content link takes the user to the document or site that has been tagged or rated. Clicking the tag name takes the user to the tag profile, shown in Figure 3. This functionality allows users to connect to people and make connections between people and content, which adds context and credibility to information assets, increasing their value to individuals and the organization as a whole. The activity feeds let people stay in touch and also helps them know what is going on with their colleagues. In this way, activity feeds help achieve the objective of improving the way knowledge assets are leveraged in the organization.

Figure 2. Activity feed examples

Figure 3. Tag profile

Organization Browser

Traditionally, the most popular area of almost every organization’s intranet is the company directory. People want to know basic contact information for their colleagues and where they fit in to the organization. SharePoint 2010 adds a new “organization” feature that exposes the formal organization of the company in a visually compelling Silverlight display.

Figure 4 shows a simple organization browser. The “organization picker” can be customized by the SharePoint administrator to show how people are organized in many ways—by division, by product line, by account, by department, or by location.

Figure 4. Organization browser

Content

The Content section of the profile allows users to add content to their personal sites. The Content area is essentially equivalent to a “private drive” on a network share. By default, there are two very clearly labeled document libraries in the Content section: Personal Documents and Shared Documents. The Personal Documents library is automatically created with unique permissions and is only visible to the user and the SharePoint administrator. The Shared Documents library is “open”—documents posted to this library are displayed on the user’s public home page. One perceived risk of moving from “private drives” to personal sites is the problem of inadequately trained users exposing personal or other sensitive content by mistake. These two libraries, with security “predefined,” help minimize that risk while providing the benefit of helping to engage people with shared content.

Memberships

The Memberships section of the profile shows the sites where a user has member (contributor) privileges. Figure 5 shows an example of the Memberships tab of the My Site. By selecting Edit Memberships (see Figure 6), users can select categories in which to group their sites and edit privacy settings to choose to share or not share any group memberships with their colleagues.

Figure 5. Memberships

Figure 6. Edit Memberships