An Integrated Collaboration Platform

New and Improved

• My Sites
• Social feedback
• Wikis
• Blogs

SharePoint 2010 provides capabilities to help transform the way people and companies work together to share expertise and ideas, meet changing demands, and promote innovation. In this release, SharePoint offers improved social-networking features, including blogs, wikis, status updates, and team sites, and can help companies gain a competitive advantage through innovation, increased productivity, consolidated IT spending, and improved workforce agility.

My Sites

A My Site is a personal SharePoint site that people can customize. People can change the content and design of their My Sites and include a public profile, where they can share details like contact information and colleagues. My Sites first appeared in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and was included in subsequent versions of SharePoint. SharePoint 2010 dramatically enhances My Sites with new social features, including user profiles, newsfeeds, and the “Ask Me About” section.

User Profiles

The user profile is the core of the social features in SharePoint 2010. People can share their personal information and knowledge, and they can determine how much of that information to make public. My Site user profiles let people view social information like the organizational browser, tags and notes manager, note board, and more.

Figure 6 My Site user profile

Newsfeeds

Newsfeeds show people’s recent activities and are a vital part of many social networking solutions. SharePoint 2010 introduces this capability with default newsfeed settings based on activity monitoring from within SharePoint itself. The default setting can then be changed to include external feeds as well. By connecting newsfeeds to activity monitoring, SharePoint 2010 shows people’s activities by date, which helps community members keep track of project work and progress.

"Ask Me About"

To more easily share their expertise, people can add keywords or tags to their profiles under the “Ask Me About” section. SharePoint 2010 can also examine patterns in Sent Items folders in Microsoft Outlook® 2010 and then suggest keywords for the “Ask Me About” section, which people can then accept or decline.

Social Feedback

Social feedback—including tagging, bookmarking, rating, and commenting—is a new addition to the SharePoint 2010 experience. These features take the social experience of SharePoint 2010 to a new level of participation and interaction, helping people to discover content as well as what others think of that content.

Tags

People use tags by assigning descriptive words or categories to content. SharePoint Communities features two types of tagging: social tagging and expertise tagging. Social tagging adds metadata to content to describe what it is, what it contains, or what it does. Expertise tagging adds metadata to describe the person on the My Site profile, such as what they do, which projects they work on, or what skills they have. By using social tagging to tag content, people can help build the structure of the company’s information and improve search relevance for that content. By using expertise tagging to tag other people in SharePoint 2010, people help build relationships and connections in the company.

Figure 7 Tags and notes

Bookmarks

Social bookmarking allows people to share bookmarks with a community of users to help build the knowledge and perspective of the community as a whole. In SharePoint 2010, people bookmark content (including content outside of SharePoint) by clicking the “I Like It” tag. By using bookmarks in SharePoint 2010, people can include any piece of Internet content in their communities’ sets of social bookmarks.

Figure 8 Tagging and bookmarking

Ratings

In many social networking platforms, people share their opinions of content by rating and commenting on the activities and contributions of other people. In SharePoint 2010, people can rate content on a fivepoint scale and comment on it, much like how they can comment on a blog post. People can then search both the original content and the comments associated with it.

Note Boards

The Note Board Web Part gives people a place to post comments, questions, and other notes so that people across the company can easily communicate with each other. People can add Note Boards to My Sites, tag profiles, and tags and notes pages.

Wikis

SharePoint 2010 incorporates wiki technology into all team site pages. People can easily edit content on a page by clicking the Edit tab and typing in the page. They can also easily embed Web Parts, media files, and SharePoint lists into the page.

Figure 9 Editing a wiki page

SharePoint 2010 also features Enterprise Wikis to help consolidate company-wide information into a central, easy-to-manage repository. The Enterprise Wiki template is built on the SharePoint publishing infrastructure to support rich page types with embedded metadata, allowing the combination of unstructured wiki content with structured data. Using page editing, people can embed dynamic content, including rich media. In addition, the Enterprise Wiki uses the Managed Metadata service to provide categorization for pages and includes, by default, features such as ratings, metadata-driven navigation, and the ability to activate workflows as part of managing the content.

Figure 10 Changing the page layout of an Enterprise Wiki

Blogs

SharePoint 2010 enhances blogs for improved author and reader experiences. Each person in the company can have a personal blog, which is linked to his or her My Site. When people submit blog posts, the posts are added to the Recent Activity section of their My Sites.

The blog site template in SharePoint 2010 features enhanced, blog-related navigation elements that allow people to sort posts by category and date. Blog content features an AJAX-based page experience when people toggle the comment view on and off. Readers can view the “About this blog” content area, which explains the purpose of the blog and introduces the blog’s author or authors.

In addition to individual blogs, SharePoint 2010 provides team blogs, which allow multiple people to publish blog posts. Teams can use blogs to work with internal and external customers, or with other teams who are interested in the status or progress of a project or for any other purpose.

Blog authors can take advantage of the Office Fluent user interface and the new rich text editor that are built into SharePoint 2010. The Ribbon user interface in SharePoint 2010 provides live preview functionality and easy access to commonly used actions, like inserting images or uploading files. Blog authors can also use external programs like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Windows Live™ Writer for a different blog editing experience.

Figure 11 SharePoint blog with embedded Presence indicators