Enterprise social includes the
social networking features and the infrastructure to support that
capability. By now, most of us are familiar with social networking
features such as microblogging, posting to an activity feed, liking
posts, communities, and targeting users. SharePoint 2013 has all these
capabilities, as well as several additional features that make it very
attractive to enterprises that want to implement some sort of
enterprise social capability.
My Sites
My Sites included social capability in
SharePoint 2010, but in general the scope and breadth of the
functionality was considered insufficient versus other social
applications. In SharePoint 2013, My Sites have a new look, some
improved capability for the activity feed, new functionality in the
form of SkyDrive Pro, and some significant infrastructure changes.
Overall, My Sites include three different sets of components:
- A web application, content databases, and services
- A My Sites host site collection
- A personal site collection
Activity Feed
Those of you familiar with SharePoint
2010 know that it included a rudimentary activity feed (“My Newsfeed”)
on the My Site host page. This displayed microblog posts and profile
changes related to the user’s colleagues, such as when a user gets a
new manager. This information was stored in a social database. While
this was a good first step, it lacked the interactive nature that a
true social feed such as Facebook provides, which is what users have
come to expect. With SharePoint 2013, the new activity feed finally
supports two-way conversations; therefore, it is a more fully
functional microblogging environment. The My Site host site collection
and web pages contain the activity feed or newsfeed page, and the About
Me page of the user. A user can post activities, ask questions, comment
on other posts, and “like” content in their feed. In addition, users
see the activities from all their community memberships, and can follow
people, documents, websites, and tags. A big change from SharePoint
2010 is that all activity feed content is stored in the user’s personal
site, and this content is stored in one or more content databases. This
means every user needs to have a personal site in order to use this
capability.
NOTE Activity
feed information, documents in the new personal document library called
SkyDrive Pro, and information about sites and documents being followed
are stored in content databases, which differs from SharePoint 2010,
which stored social information in the social database. User profile
data is still stored in the profile database in SharePoint 2013, just
like it was in SharePoint 2010. Information about following people and
tags is also stored in the profile database, just as it was in
SharePoint 2010.
Hashtags
People who have never used Twitter may be wondering what a hashtag is. A hashtag
is simply a keyword or topic that can be added to a microblog entry to
enable other users to consume and filter content from their activity
feed. For example, if you create a microblog entry that contains
content about SharePoint 2013, you could add the hashtag
“#sharepoint2013.” This simple action enables some very powerful
behavior. In SharePoint 2013, hashtags can be followed as well as
searched. Although in SharePoint 2010, the Managed Metadata service
enabled you to tag documents and pages within your site, in SharePoint
2013 the tagging capability has been enhanced with this new hashtag
capability in the activity feed.
Personal Site
The personal site is also a site
collection, just like the My Site host site collection. This site
contains two different SharePoint lists that contain the activity feed
information, the SkyDrive Pro page and content, a page displaying the
documents being followed, and a page displaying the sites being
followed.
SkyDrive Pro
Personal file storage services have
become very popular over the last few years. Numerous different
applications, such as Box.net, Dropbox, and even Microsoft’s own
SkyDrive, enable users to save, share, and synchronize personal files
from any computer in the world. Typically, an application runs locally
on the device, and the content is stored in data centers in the cloud.
This may work well for personal information, but many corporations
consider cloud storage a security risk and don’t allow employees to
store company information in the cloud.
It is a private, personal file storage for the
enterprise; therefore, SkyDrive Pro (SDP) differs from the public
SkyDrive capability mentioned earlier. SDP provides a central location
for storing all of a user’s documents, and sharing them with other
employees. In addition to the SharePoint library, there is also a
desktop application called SkyDrive Pro that is installed when Office
2013 is installed on the user’s desktop. The library and desktop
application work together to deliver the following functionality:
- An improved user interface and easier process for sharing documents with other people in the organization
- Synchronization of the SkyDrive Pro library to your computer or mobile device
Distributed Cache
New to SharePoint 2013, the Distributed
Cache service provides caching to various features in SharePoint 2013.
This service is built on top of Windows Server AppFabric, which is
installed as one of the SharePoint 2013 prerequisites. If you plan to
use activity feeds, your farm must have the Distributed Cache service
enabled. This cache temporarily stores the microblog entries so that
they are immediately available to others in the environment.
Communities
SharePoint 2013 introduces a new site template called Community Site.
This template builds upon the standard site template by adding a
specifically tailored, moderated discussion board that helps to
facilitate conversations between members of the community. In addition
to creating and participating in discussions, community owners can also
assign badges and set up a reputation system in their community.
Another new template associated with communities is the Community Portal
template. This enterprise site template provides results for any sites
that use the Community Site template in the SharePoint farm.
In order to give users more incentive to
participate in communities, SharePoint has included another new feature
in their social toolbox, Reputation. Reputation
enables users to find and engage experts, and encourages
enterprise-wide social media adoption. After it is enabled on a
community site, site owners can assign point values to various
activities such as creating a new post or replying to a post. They can
also define achievement levels that users can reach by accruing the
defined number of points for that level. A user’s achievement level is
displayed near his or her name throughout the site. An important part
of the reputation system is badging,
whereby a site owner can configure automatically assigning a badge to
users when they reach an achievement level, or users can manually
assign badges to other users.
User Profile Synchronization
User profile synchronization
configuration in SharePoint 2010 was one of the more difficult, if not
the most difficult, challenges administrators faced when deploying a
new farm. Fortunately, SharePoint 2013 introduces a new option for
synchronizing user profiles from Active Directory. Called Active Directory Import,
this capability is similar to the SharePoint 2007 import process. There
are many benefits to using this new import process, such as faster
performance, easier setup, and the ability to use LDAP filters to limit
the objects being imported. Unfortunately, there are also some
drawbacks, the biggest of which is that the process is import only,
which means there’s no capability to write back to Active Directory.
User profile synchronization using Forefront
Identity Manager (FIM) is still available in SharePoint 2013. The FIM
process is similar in configuration, but the full and incremental
synchronization performance has been improved. Also available is
support for custom synchronization using the User Profile Service web
service and object models.
User Profile Replication Engine
The only real change to the
User Profile Replication Engine is that it has been absorbed by the
SharePoint team. This means that it is included with the other
SharePoint 2013 components and therefore doesn’t require a separate
download. Presumably, this also means that it will be given a little
more attention in the future if updates or changes are needed.
