SharePoint 2010 social features - “I like”

A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of buzz around the new social features in Facebook. Just reading their announcement it’s clear that Facebook is trying to leverage its huge social user base to glue together a lot of silos that exist on the web.

Basically they are creating new ways for websites to leverage Facebook’s social links. One of the most commented-on features is the “Like” button that website owners can insert on their pages to allow people to tag them. It’s not an entirely new tool but I’d say that this time is different because a feature only really goes mainstream when a site with a user base of almost half a billion people decides to implement it.

You might ask what this has to do with SharePoint. Well, the reason I’m talking about this is because, interestingly enough, the newly-released SharePoint 2010 comes with a lot of similar features built-in.

The previous SharePoint version (MOSS 2007) lacked some of the main social features and a lot of vendors and developers had to build their own social infrastructure on top of MOSS 2007 (including NLC). One of the reasons these features were lacking was because nobody had thought much about them by the time SharePoint 2007 was released - even Facebook was in its infancy then. But now with SharePoint 2010 it’s all built into the framework, which makes it a lot more suitable for creating Enterprise Social Computing solutions. It’s a lot easier now using SharePoint 2010 to come close to the 8 Pillars of Social Computing.

Social features 

While there are several new features in SharePoint 2010, the three most important social developments are Activity Feeds, Social Data and Managed Metadata. Activity Feeds allow you to see what’s going on in the social space similar to Linkedin and Facebook activity feeds. The Social Data features are the ones related to tags, ratings and notes (a type of social comment). And to glue them all and to provide some context to them, there is the Managed Metadata service.

Service applications

One of the other big changes in SharePoint 2010 is related to the services it provides. In SharePoint 2007 there was a concept called Shared Services Provider (SSP) where clients who had an Enterprise version of SharePoint 2007 could use things like Excel Services, User Profiles, Businss Data Catalogues and Search. But this was a very bloated “all or nothing” solution that didn’t give much flexibility when creating SharePoint farm solutions. For example, even if you didn’t need Excel Services you would get it anyway when creating a new SSP.

In SharePoint 2010, Microsoft completely re-designed this service model and created what is now called Service Applications. This is a lot more interesting model where you can pick and choose services “a la carte.” And all the new social features leverage this new Service Applications model. What this means is that there’s a lot more flexibility to share information across sites and the scalability has been enhanced a lot.

Bringing the people and content together

One great example of how this new service model combined with the new social features is a nice little button that SharePoint shows on all the sites that are created. When users access a SharePoint 2010 site they see an “I Like It” button (like the “Like” Facebook one, if you can follow that). When users click on this button what happens behind the scenes is really interesting
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A call is made to the Social Data Services and the Managed Metadata service and that page is tagged for that user. What is important to understand here is that this might seem simple at first but as in the Facebook solution, this simple gesture makes disconnected silos evolve into a connected world where the social graph from users makes it a lot more relevant.

Tags and notes

Imagine on a huge corporate intranet where different departments have their own intranet and all the information is disconnected. Usually the content from the marketing department is never shared or aligned with the engineering department (which happens frequently but it shouldn’t). SharePoint has a new feature that allows users to tag or post notes (comments) on practically any content inside SharePoint sites.

So in our example above if a user in the engineering department tags a technical document with the word “Product XYZ,” and another user in the marketing department tags an advertisement document with the same keywords, then this keywords is managed (stored) centrally via the Managed Metadata service and through search or other social features (activity streams) people can find that these two documents relate to each other.

Social analytics

What is interesting about all these social features is that a lot of social content and activity are recorded in real time. Imagine in a large corporation if the CEO wants to find out the entire buzz around his new press release, including the impact internally (are employees happy with the new announcement or was it really unpopular?).

All this could be possible one day using a framework like SharePoint 2010. It doesn’t come yet out of the box with this social analytics piece but that’s something feasible to be created on top of the platform (more on this subject in the future). Also, the social graph built in SharePoint as mentioned in a previous post is a lot closer to a Twitter model than Facebook which is really interesting on a corporate scenario because you can find who are the real influencers in the organization that drive change and bring innovation into the company.

And this is just the beginning

Personally I think that SharePoint 2010 is currently the best option for those looking to implement an enterprise social computing strategy. Not it only does it provide a lot of these new social pieces but it is also a lot easier to integrate with other systems. And combined with search on top of that, this can be quite a tremendous platform. I’m not saying (and expect) that you will have a half billion user base one day like Facebook but I’m quite positive that it can cause a lot of buzz in your company!

NLC has been helping organizations plan and execute social computing solutions using SharePoint for years. If you have questions or would like more information, please don’t hesistate to get in touch.