Using SharePoint & Silverlight for Enterprise Social Networking

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to speak about supporting enterprise social computing efforts with SharePoint and Silverlight at the Toronto-based SharePoint Code Camp. It was a really nice event organized by the local SharePoint community. We had good attendance despite the chilly day (-30 degrees Celsius). The complete slides from my presentation are available here.

My talk was focused on the User Profile and Colleague features in MOSS 2007; more specifically, how these features can be leveraged to create richer user experiences when connecting coworkers and facilitating collaboration in an intranet context. The presentation was inspired by two of the tactics featured in Shannon Ryan’s recent post, Enterprise 2.0 Strategy: 5 Tactics for implementing Social Computing on your Intranet.

People and Ease of Use

People and Ease of Use are two key concepts that are central to social computing success. People can be handled using the User Profile infrastructure in MOSS 2007 and greater control of the user interface (hopefully, leading to greater ease of use) can be easily achieved using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.

The social networking features inherent in SharePoint have been criticized by some; in fact, non-linear’s VP, Randy Woods, summed up the criticisms well in his post about SharePoint and Social Computing: The New World of Collaboration. Some of these criticisms may have to do with the fact that many still do not fully understand the backend infrastructure that supports social computing in SharePoint and that out-of-box features were originally designed when common social features were still fuzzy. I agree that while, out-of-the-box social components within SharePoint may pose some usability challenges, the flexible backend infrastructure that exists within Sharepoint enables the creation of custom solutions that are more in-line with today’s common social website patterns.

The 4 Pillars of Social Computing in SharePoint

There are four basic pillars of any social computing-enhanced intranet: Profiles, Connections, Communities and Tracking (also known as “Presence” or “Activity Feeds”). SharePoint has everything in place to let you implement all of these.

In order to implement these four concepts in MOSS 2007 you can use:

• Profiles - SharePoint includes a User Profile Repository; a storage area designed to organize and aggregate user data from different systems such as Active Directory (AD) or other enterprise systems with the ability to expose data via web services or ADO.NET provider. The repository is extensible, so you can create your own custom properties and are not limited to those available out-of-the-box. These properties can also be crawled by the Microsoft search engine and can be used when performing a “People Search.”
• Connections - Each user profile has a Colleagues property. Colleagues can be a users’ manager, a peer, or a direct report. Users can also add their own Colleagues which helps break the organizational hierarchy into a more of a network of peers with like-minded interests. This feature in SharePoint also makes suggestions of colleagues with shared interest based on information it gathers from Outlook and Office Communicator.
• Communities - Each user profile also has a Membership property which stores the groups that the user belongs to. These groups can be a distribution list in Active Directory or a SharePoint site when users are in the Members group of the site.
• Tracking - The Users Profile infrastructure has a change log object that is used to track activities performed within a user’s profile. This powerful built-in feature can be used to keep colleagues updated on latest social activities. This type of activity feed can be seen on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn as users update their status and make changes with the system.

Integrating SharePoint with Silverlight

A great deal of design and interface flexibility can be achieved by leveraging the SharePoint API to create custom web parts and custom web services. Also, by using Silverlight technology, it’s possible to create engaging Rich Internet Applications (RIA) within your Intranet. In my demo (pictured below) I’ve shown a simple application that retrieves information from the User Profile repository and displays it in a webpart that exposes Silverlight content. (If you’re interested in seeing more of this demo contact info@nonlinear.ca)

It’s possible…

So if you think SharePoint cannot be used to facilitate social networking within the Enterprise, think again. Indeed, its capabilities are exceptionally powerful and flexible but sometimes underestimated.

By combining SharePoint with a rich technology such as Silverlight, you are no longer bound by the out-of-the box UI - ideally leading to an intranet experience that’s cleaner and more engaging.

Whitepaper Update:

For more information on Enterprise Social Networking, download non~linear creations’ new whitepaper, Enterprise Social Computing and the Imperative of Participation