1. Social Networking
“Social networking,” also referred to as “social computing,”
is the practice of many people collaborating and sharing information
about their lives, preferences, thoughts, and feelings online. The IT
industry and personal computing space have seen a prolific increase in
the adoption of social networking, through community-based web sites like Facebook.com and Twitter.com,
and collaboration via blogs and wikis. SharePoint has always been about
collaboration in the workspace, and with the large drive in social
networking from the home and personal computing space, corporations and
non-corporate organizations are waking up to the benefits that social
networking provides.
If you ask any person familiar with social networking to define it, he or she will most likely mention Facebook.
In recent years, Facebook has become a household name in the social
networking space because it provides an intuitive means for those who
can use a computer and the Internet to share information about
themselves and collaborate on this information with others. Prior to
Facebook, those with writing skills, and something to write about,
hosted blogs on sites like blogger.com and livejournal.com. In fact, the livejournal.com
site today is very different from what it was a few years ago; it
embraces collaboration and user adoption through information sharing
and is no longer a space to write a monolithic stream of thought.
SharePoint has always provided a level of
personal space in the platform, from as far back as SharePoint Portal
Server 2003, with My Sites, which allow users in an organization to
store documents and lists and disseminate their own content to others
in the organization. SharePoint 2007 went the next step and introduced
wiki and blog site definitions, and with the addition of public-facing web site capability via the publishing infrastructure,
SharePoint could participate in the public blogosphere world.
SharePoint included many of the information-sharing and content-tagging
features that users have come to expect from other social networking
platforms. SharePoint 2010 also introduced the Managed Metadata
Service, which allows organizations to build managed taxonomy of tags
and allow user self-expression tagging—folksonomy—with custom tagging
capabilities. Blogs and wikis still exist in SharePoint, only
better—they now include the ability to host rich media in the form of
video and audio content in their pages.
How has SharePoint 2013 enhanced the social
networking scene? SharePoint 2013 includes all of the aforementioned
social networking features of SharePoint 2007 and 2010, with a fresh
branding and new layout. SharePoint 2013 also centralizes users’ social
networking around their newsfeed—the core of any
good social networking platform. Users of SharePoint 2010 had use of
the newsfeed. SharePoint 2013 makes the newsfeed easier to use and more
intuitive, and organizations no longer need to look to third-party
tools to provide the rich immersive experience they have come to expect
from social networking.
A feature new to SharePoint 2013 is integration of SkyDrive Pro, which allows organizations to treat SharePoint like their professional version of the public SkyDrive
offering from Microsoft. Users in the organization can synchronize
folders on their workstations with SharePoint, just as they do with the
cloud at home.
2. Notes and Tagging
“Tagging” is the flavor of the Internet these
days. With the explosion of social networking, and sites like Facebook,
everyone is in the mode to tag and “like” content. SharePoint 2013 is
on the tagging bandwagon and offers users the ability to perform
extensive tagging using the Managed Metadata Service application.
When discussing SharePoint tagging, notes, and
social networking capabilities, the topic of metadata will invariably
come into play. Metadata is “data about data.” For
example, a database schema defines the structure and properties of SQL
tables—this is metadata for the actual row data in the table. In the
world of SharePoint, tags are metadata, because they give the reader of
certain content some level of categorization and thus context.
SharePoint bakes metadata into the platform and surfaces it in basic
lists, document libraries, document and records management, publishing,
and social networking.
Tagging in SharePoint 2013
Tagging is ubiquitous throughout the site
collection. At the top right of any standard SharePoint page, you will
see the Share and Follow icons. (I say “standard
SharePoint page” because publishing pages follow templates defined by
site designers and may not include these icons, except as part of the
ribbon when editing the page.) See Figure 1 for an example of these icons.
The SharePoint Follow icon is synonymous with
“Like.” When clicking the Follow icon, SharePoint tags the site and it
appears under favorite sites, which you may access at any time from the
Sites link in the top right. SharePoint allows following of various
objects in the platform, including
- Sites
- Lists
- Libraries
- List Items
- Documents and Images
- Pages
I clicked Follow on a few sites and a document in my development environment. As you can see from Figure 2, activities are starting to show up in my newsfeed. Just like with Facebook, the more interaction you have with SharePoint, the more populated your newsfeed becomes.
Note New
content tagged or new notes added to your SharePoint MySite do not show
up in your newsfeed immediately. The Activity Feed Job in Central
Administration updates newsfeeds on a schedule.
Document libraries do not
enable the tagging capability on contained documents by default. The
following set of steps details how to enable tagging for a document
library:
- From any Document Library View page, click the Library tab from the ribbon.
- Click the Library Settings icon from the ribbon.
- Click the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings link.
- Check the Add Enterprise Keywords check box to add the Enterprise
Keywords Metadata column to the document library. SharePoint will not
allow you to opt out of this option once it is checked and the Settings
page saved. The Enterprise Keywords Metadata column allows folksonomy
behavior for documents in the library.
- Check the Metadata Publishing check box to allow any folksonomy
tags entered for a document to appear in your newsfeed, profile pages,
tag cloud, and so on, as a social tag.
Note When
saving a document from Microsoft Word to a SharePoint 2010/2013
document library with an Enterprise Keywords column, the Save As dialog
displays a Tags text box to save entered tags to the Enterprise
Keywords column in the library list item associated with the document.
