Matt Feczko and Ben Wilde focused on real life scenario on how social will work. They include:
- Asking and answering questions
- Managing multiple projects
- Working with documents
- Finding our more about people
The whole concept is that social should make life easier. It should improve employee engagement, team collaboration, and business agility. However, all of this should still allow individual users to control their privacy. Let them share what they choose to share.
Intro to SharePoint Social
The key concept of social includes following. Content is scattered all over SharePoint. Things happen on sites that you don’t check every day. People use hashtags (#) to track key concepts. The following view brings that all to you in a more easily digestible format. So what happens when you follow something?
- Basic micro-blog post: “I need help” which can be followed with an answer. Oddly enough, I’ve had this happen before when I posted a Yammer update that i was researching a thorny search enging question.
- Track what’s happening as people work together. This is collaboration to a smaller group.
- Serendipitous discovery: a friend now follows a cool site. Note: it’s secure. If she followed a cool site that you cannot access, it will not hit your wall.
- Document Posts: track what’s happening with a document
- Follow a tag: You can see conversations around a specific topic, regardless of whether you know a person or not.
Asking and answering questions
Start in the everyone vs the following view. This lets you see what everyone across the company is talking about. Matt hits this view at least once a day. He likes to answer questions. Hit reply to a query. It’s a shotgun approach but it is also a stream of knowledge. Matt uses the feed to ask questions. This approach can work on an everyone feed or to specific feeds in sites, etc. SharePoint allows you to define whether to share with everyone or a smaller group of people.
Mentions of specific people ‘@Ben Wilde’ can be pushed via email if you want to configure it that way.
Also, the trending tags web part is a great way to see what people are talking about throughout the company. Admins can also relate tags so spc2012 and spc conference 2012 now become one.
Managing Multiple Projects
There are all sorts of ways to use SharePoint to manage projects. You can use sites with cool web parts yes………but it can get out of control with all the sites that you happen to be following. Ben focuses on exactly this. This works in a number of ways such as email. You can get notice of mentions and then jump straight into the conversation.(Yes, email hasn’t gone away even if you want to cut down on its usage.)
Sites now work much better with social. If you assign a task to someone, they see it in their global tasks view. They can get notified. You can setup what you want to see by following specific sites. Following a site is simple, just click follow in the upper right corner of the homepage. Of course, you automatically follow any site that you create. Share a site with a simple click and inline box. You can even follow directly from email notifications.
Working with Documents
Mentions is the notification center within SharePoint. Whenever someone mentions you, go here to see it. Mentions range from simple @yourname to assigned tasks.
In the demo, they dragged a document and dropped it into the doc library of the project teamsite. Once dropped in, they can use inline tools to share it, grab and share a url, etc. The share is a very simple copy and paste into the teamsite newsfeed. Also from the simple controls, you can see more info on the document. That includes a preview, who it’s shared with, and doc stats. You can also follow a doc from the inline controls.
Finding out more about People
You can search for people. It’s a fuzzy name search so don’t worry about getting the spelling exactly perfect. But a specific name search should not be the only option. Bill did a search for ‘Matt SharePoint’ which showed Matt Feczko. The search worked because Matt has SharePoint in his personal tags and in his description. That then gives you the option to click onto Matt’s profile and dive deeper. The profile looks a little different and is organized differently from SharePoint 2010 but the content remains the same.
When looking at who someone follows, you can then follow who they follow directly from the list view rather than having to click through.
He highlights the importance of filling out a profile to increase the relevancy of search. Profile doesn’t just allow you to define you. It allows you to define how you want SharePoint to work with you. You can set email notification preferences for example.
How to manage your privacy
Here’s the options on what you control
- follow a person
- follow a tag
- follow a document or tag
- birthday celebration
- job title change
- Workplace anniversary
- Updating your ask me about
- posting on a note board
- Linkng or rating something
- New blog post
- participation in communities.
As you can see, there’s a lot of ways to share in the activity feed only those actions you want to share.
