Sharepoint and Social Computing: The New World of Collaboration

We were fortunate enough to attend the Microsoft Partner Conference in Houston earlier this month. Many of the keynote and breakout sessions are available at Digital WPC. However, these videos capture neither the inescapable parties, nor a number of the seminars that helped us understand Microsoft’s take on the world of social computing inside the firewall (equivalent buzzwords: Intranet 2.0, Enterprise 2.0).

The break-out session we found most valuable was called Collaboration: The New World of Enterprise 2.0 Social Computing Solutions

Drivers of change

Microsoft speakers pointed to several trends that are powering a shift in how corporations communicate internally:

1. Point-to-point collaboration is morphing into collaboration based on communities of interest. Over the last 15 years, corporations globally have mastered point-to-point collaboration via email attachments, but this is giving way to a need for collaboration amongst a broader range of people. This observation may be slightly self-serving (Hmm – what product allows for group collaboration? Oh, right, SharePoint). Nonetheless, it feels accurate to us.
2. Corporations are recognizing the heightened value that communities of interest offer. Where a team is a defined, time-limited group of people with a common goal, communities of interest persist in time and hone in on a topic or theme as opposed to an objective. Communities of interest may be the key to finally realizing the potential of corporate knowledge retention.
3. Knowledge discovery is changing. Better search tools and more integrated information infrastructure allow employees to find almost anything, but knowing what is important requires expertise that is in short supply. Collective filtering, tagging, scoring – the so-called “wisdom of crowds” can ensure broad sharing of key expertise criteria.

Microsoft SharePoint and Enterprise 2.0/Social Computing

The Radicati Group claims that SharePoint has a 34% share in social computing, and this was pointed out by the session leaders. The truth of this statement comes down to how you define “social computing” (Does Sharepoint 2003 collaboration count?) Regardless of your definition, however, SharePoint licence sales exceeded $1 billion in its first year, and you can’t ignore the 100 million seat licences sold either.

SharePoint was described as addressing social computing at three levels:

And, as SharePoint is fundamentally an application development platform, you can build whatever you envision –given time, money and electricity.

Microsoft Partners Round-out the Web 2.0 Story

Analysts have not been terribly complimentary of SharePoint’s social networking capabilities. And there is definitely some truth to their observations. I do wonder, however, if these comments will feel short-sighted once the broader Microsoft partner community ramps up to meet the vast social networking opportunities that are now on the horizon.

Already, a dozen or so Microsoft partners have released software designed to enhance SharePoint 2007’s social computing capabilities. JP Holston, CEO of Newsgator, gave a compelling demonstration of how partner solutions add value. Sitting on top of SharePoint 2007, Newsgator Social Sites 2.0 appears to enhance almost every social computing element of the underlying platform. In particular, their clever use of Ajax to simplify the user interface and accelerate responsiveness holds promise for improved employee adoption.

The Bottom Line on Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0

Microsoft senses the importance of the Enterprise 2.0 movement and has built base features into SharePoint 2007 that can accommodate extensibility. In turn, the partner community is beginning to respond with thoughtful extensions. But it is telling that only two of the hundred or so breakout sessions in the partner conference recognized the existence of the social computing movement. Similarly, Microsoft speakers during the keynote sessions did not mention the topic. I see two possible explanations for this:

• Microsoft doesn’t see the “intranet 2.0” movement as representing a fundamentally new way of doing business, but rather as an extension of existing business trends. It’s worth reflecting on it and addressing the trend but not worthy of executive focus.
• Microsoft hasn’t yet fully ramped up to play in the 2.0 game – the company is famously capable of arriving late to the dance and still making out okay (anyone remember the short-lived dominance of Netscape before Microsoft bridged “the internet gap”?). I would expect to see a broad range of products introduced in the next two years, specifically aimed at the Intranet 2.0 market.

We’ll soon find out which interpretation is correct. But one thing is certain – with 100 million licences already in the market, those contemplating Enterprise 2.0 initiatives cannot ignore SharePoint 2007’s momentum.

Recently, I compared Google and Microsoft approaches to tuning their search solutions for very common and somewhat common searches. This post examines the best tactics for improving results for the “long tail” of search — those infrequent searches that make up about one-third of search volume inside the enterprise.

Broadening the Field

The public search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask) do a spectacular job of taking what users enter and returning results based on associated terms. Type in “types of dogs” and Google.com returns results for both “types of dogs” and “breeds of docs.”This intelligent expansion of search terms is even more important inside the firewall. Your organization almost certainly has acronyms and industry-specific terminology that neither the Google Search Appliance nor MSFT Search Server Express will understand “out of the box.”

The example I frequently use comes from an intranet deployment we performed for a significant multinational. If you are an employee of this company and want to take time off, you need to locate the Paid Time Off form. This is universally known as the PTO. Out of the box, a search on PTO doesn’t return this form, so we needed to provide a custom search expansion to make sure the correct results were returned.

Both the GSA and MSFT search technologies provide interfaces to facilitate this. Google offers two options:

• Query Expansion: this allows you to automatically run searches for additional search terms when a given search query is made. For example, you can run a search for “paid time off” whenever an employee searches for PTO. This works best for very closely associated terms.
• Related Queries: when terms are less closely associated, you can leverage related queries by suggesting alternative searches an employee might consider. For example, you might configure queries so that a search on “telephone number” returns the requested results, and also recommends a search on “employee directory”.

While it’s possible to programmatically manage Google’s query expansion and related query capabilities, Microsoft makes this considerably easier. In the case of Microsoft Search Server Express, you can modify the tsenu.xml file to expand specific search terms to include additional terms or to replace the search term with additional terms.

Enterprise 2.0 Implications

We’ve discussed before the critical role that search plays in deriving business value from Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. One fast and effective approach to improving search effectiveness is to leverage the user generated content that is the hallmark of the 2.0 movement. NLC has had success in allowing Intranet users to add synonyms and appropriate acronyms. Allowing users to participate in the tuning of your enterprise search vehicle - regardless of the technology used - improves user adoption and can significantly accelerate tuning activities. Both Microsoft and Google search products can be adapted to allow this type of user participation.

What About REAL Search Tuning? Changing the Underlying Algorithm

This is straightforward. Microsoft lets you mess with all the levers and knobs in the underlying algorithm; Google gives you zero access. Nada.

In practice, this matters much less than it might seem. In almost all cases, you are far better off tuning your deployment using the tools Microsoft provides rather than messing with the underlying algorithm. If you do change the algorithm, you need to be absolutely obsessive about measuring the overall improvements.

non~linear creations set up a corporate Twitter account today.

You can find us at:

twitter.com/nonlinear_tweet

We’ll be using the account to share our thoughts about the industry and provide insights into the non~linear creations website planning and development process.

Our focus will be on many of the same subjects found here in our blog including:

• Content management
• Enterprise 2.0
• Search
• Online marketing
• Information architecture and user experience
• Web analytics

Drop by and say hello!

Update from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

If you check our Twitter account today or tomorrow, you’ll get the play-by-play of one of the largest Microsoft events in the industry.  We’ll be sharing insights regarding how to leverage social technologies, MS Search and SharePoint within an enterprise context.

Earlier this week, I posted a blog comparing the approaches the Google Search Appliance and Microsoft Search Technologies take to optimizing the short tail of search. Today’s post looks at how you can address the mid-tail of searches by tilting the landscape of the search results.

The Google Search Appliance

Google backed away from their stance that ”tuning search in the enterprise…can set off a tornado of search results chaos” after they introduced a “biasing” control in 2007. This feature lets you “bias” the GSA’s baked-in algorithm to rank documents of specific kinds or from specific sources more favourably or less favourably. Recently, Google introduced the capacity to bias documents by date of indexing, as well. This simple interface actually provides substantial capacity for modifying results so that they reflect your organization’s business rules for content creation and storage.

Microsoft Search Server Express, etc.

Microsoft provides an interesting – and potentially more powerful – approach to the same challenge. Non-technical personnel can identify “authoritative” pages or documents, which is to say the importance of documents “near” these sources of authority are increased (in fact, with this function, you can define pages as having primary, secondary, tertiary or negative authority).What counts as authoritative? In our search tuning engagements we look to these sources of authority:

• Index pages (which are considered to be authoritative out of the box)
• Entry or start pages (as indicated by web analytics)
• Pages or content authored by executives
• Blogs by in-house thought leaders
• The shared social bookmarks of in-house thought leaders (particularly if you have an enterprise 2.0 strategy in place)

Warning

Both of these approaches change the topography of the search results landscape – frequently in unpredictable ways. They share a need for careful experimentation. Frequently, modifying these settings to solve one search deficiency will create problems for a whole other range of issues.

Next Steps

In a few days, I’ll post the final blog in this series. In the meantime, feel free to download our white paper on Google Search Appliance Best Practices - it addresses many of the concepts covered here in additional detail.