June 2010 – bruce2b

make_the_scene — Social sharing - how is it different in the workplace?

I discovered an interesting video recently while helping a client demonstrate how users of a SharePoint document management system can share information about the documents they are managing. The video is by Michael Gannotti, a technology specialist at Microsoft, and it apparently shows how Microsoft uses SharePoint 2010’s social media features in-house. The video covers other SharePoint 2010 features as well, but I found 2 segments particularly relevant.

Social Media features in SharePoint (from timestamp 6 minutes 49 seconds to 15 minutes 50 seconds):

people search — users can find people who are experts on the subjects they’re researching;
publishing — via wikis, FAQS, and blogs;
user home pages — users can fill out their own profiles, add types of content, see their friend and group feeds;
viewing other users’ pages — users can find out more about co-workers and their work;
adding meta-information — tagging, liking, and adding notes or ratings to alert others about the relevance of content to oneself, to a project, or to a topic; and,
publishing (blogging) options — users can post to SharePoint either via a rich web-based text authoring environment or direct from a Word document.

Using One Note For Sharing (from timestamp 17 minutes 34 seconds to 18 minutes 34 seconds):

can create the equivalent of wikis and FAQs;
is web-editable;
may be better for printing; and
can also be used offline.

Here’s his video (hosted by Vimeo):

Other resources

Another useful resource concerning social media in SharePoint 2010 is this blog post by Microsoft Senior Technical Product Manager Dave Pae at TechEd earlier this month: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2010/06/07/live-from-teched-overview-of-social-computing-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx. This also links to a post about social search which not only discusses the types of content (including meta-information) which can be searched, but also covers phonetic search capabilities: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2010/06/07/live-from-teched-in-new-orleans-what-s-new-in-enterprise-search-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx.

A recent US Republican Party social media experiment misfired not because of poor moderation, as some critics have assumed, but because site managers failed to recruit and motivate the right community. This post explores ways to create an open, uncensored forum that can more constructively represent both loyal followers and potential converts who were (presumably) the intended targets of the site.

Saying they want to “give the American people a megaphone to speak out,” last week GOP Congressional leaders announced a new web site, AmericaSpeakingOut.com, an open “town meeting” where everyone has an “[o]pportunity to change the way Congress works by proposing ideas for a new policy agenda.”

Despite an enthusiastic introduction by GOP leaders, wackiness ensued. Notable submissions on the site included unlikely suggestions, like: Continue reading “Unwittingly funny GOP social media experiment failed by being generic”