Social Search – 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.