Microsoft is testing a prototype of a social network built on SharePoint, and again, it won’t be the first. We’ve done a few (Paul Mitchell Connect, a few companies I can’t name of I’d have to shoot you ;) ), and SharePoint’s governance model lends itself very well to maintain such a network. Some of the issues of legality and privacy are actually limited within a corporate social network.
Looking forward to more companies going social!
Sure you can customize it — a really good list of the top 100 SharePoint sites.
Go to Part I and Part II for a couple of great tutorials on how to make SharePoint work with SilverLight. It has screenshots and everything!
A couple of these have already past, but here’s a list of webcasts from the MSDN guys that seem pretty valuable. Read on…
Well, not really. But this white paper covers a lot of the technology and it’s a bit techy for my taste, but you get a pretty good idea how to create a Social Networking feel to MOSS pages.
One of the things we’ve been doing at the day job has been turning SharePoint on its head and using it for social networking capabilities. I know it’s one of those catchphrases that are popular now, but in our implementations, it’s done very, very well (and scaled well) in those environments. The Official Blog of the SharePoint Product Group has a great article and links to a white paper that talks about the use of knowledge within an organization.
With some of our clients, we’ve been talking to them about using SharePoint as the source of truth and establishing governance as part of that, and really analyzing their culture.
Just put it this way — MOSS isn’t just about intranets.
I’m not a big fan of tag clouds. Okay, I hate tag clouds, because I can never make them look good (I need some order in my life, okay?), but here’s an interesting concept that I saw come across my RSS Feed: a SharePoint site that is completely tag driven, built for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
This article walks through step-by-step how the Microsoft Partner Provoke created a series of custom lists so documents could be tagged by any number of categories across different groups. While there was a more controlled structure than a folksonomy (the IA’s were driving the bus), this is the ultimate flexible system.
The benefits are:
I’m guessing that the document library lives at the top level.
Ironically, they went with tag lists and filtering because tag could usability is still up in the air — hmmph!
You probably thought that it was going to stop at one part.
Clever Workarounds has published parts 2, 3 and 4 on their blog, and I’m sure it’s going to continue for some time. My favorite of the Part 4 is the square peg, round hole illustration.
Here’s the complete list:
A shout out to this blog for providing a link to an Excel worksheet that is a good starting point for doing a SharePoint implementation (or reviewing an existing implementation). It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but there’s a lot of great information even for experienced MOSS Architects.
Good question. I don’t know the exact answer (is there an exact answer for anything in technology?), but this article does a really good job of covering common sense approaches to site collection governance and MOSS. There are a few issues — what if you need to rollup content across site collections — but most of it is straight forward advice.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
