User Activity Feeds with SharePoint 2010 & Newsgator Social Sites
or 'If you want Facebook-like Activity Feeds in SP 2010?, It may be more work than you imagined.'
By now You’ve probably had the opportunity to play around with ‘best of breed’ Social Networking tools like Facebook, Jive, or DIGG!. What you may not know is that many Business Networking customers are starting to ask for similar functionality in a corporate intranet environment.
In the latter half of 2009, and with ever increasing frequency in 2010 - As Gartner’s article “The Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace” and the Nielsen-Norman groups’ ”Intranet Design Annual” awards for intranet software based on objective surveys will validate - We have been seeing clients’, Social Networking wants moved off of their Blue Sky wish lists and into the ‘must haves’ among requirements listed out in a formal Software Requirements doc or the approved REQs traceability matrix.
While SharePoint 2010 has greatly improved social networking capabilities, they are provided primarily in the team collaboration and my Site web applications BUT – when it comes to individuals connecting with one another via an interactive social activity feed off of their SharePoint Portal Home page – SharePoint 2010 Out Of The Box (OOTB) is “Not All That.’ (see previous Blog post “Social Networking using SharePoint 2010” for detailed explanation on the architectural reasons why this is true.) . The LOE (Level of Effort) involved in providing Facebook-like social networking tools within SharePoint for a recent client translated to be more costly than expected, involving a significant increase in their custom development budget as well as forcing them to incur the additional cost of acquiring 3rd party software tools to make it happen (in this case ‘Newsgator Social Sites’ – whose expense is certainly non-trivial just for the licensing package). Imagine that your run of the mill SharePoint Business Networking project, no longer pursuing an ‘Out of the Box’ approach, could well morph from a solid mid-range project into an additional expenditure on custom Dev and a similarly large additional chunk for the enterprise Newsgator package. You just reached for your heart pills after getting hit with the sticker shock of up to 2(x) your estimated total cost of ownership for something that you had assumed would be half that.
What this means to you as a SP 2010 Developer or as an Intranet Site Owner \ Administrator is that it will require a great deal of custom coding effort AND the integration of 3rd party tools if you want a truly interactive Social Intranet Site with Facebook-like activity feeds (and not just a tame OOTB SP noteboard) on your Homepage. While the OOTB noteboard can be customized with a combined usage of ‘my Site Host’ data (what Microsoft is now referring to as the ‘Social Host Source Data’) and customized document sets to provide Users with the ability to comment on, rate, and tag documents, articles, and other SP posts within a noteboard like list; this is pretty cool, very custom, and yet still not even close to the RSS-like social activity feeds provided publicly on Facebook and privately by Newsgator Social Sites. Part of the difficulty in implementing such a solution lies in the fact that OOTB MS SharePoint social networking solutions such as Blogs, Noteboards, and Discussion lists do not ‘roll-up’ across multiple sites and especially across multiple site collections [while some of this can be custom coded via profile on My Site or Team Collaboration Home Pages without 3rd party tools, implementation of Newsgator Social Sites is really the ONLY way to get these sorts of roll-ups to aggregate across multiple site collections and appear on the Portal Entry Home Page – typically an internally public-facing publishing site page rather than a members-only collaboration or team site home page for an specific team’s site collection].
Once one creates a new SharePoint Site using the unique Newsgator Social Sites site template code to it, activity feeds can be enabled that are very similar to a User’s ‘wall’ in Facebook. These can be place on the overarching portal site’s Homepage (leveraging the potential of activity feed ‘roll-ups’ from other team and publishing sites throughout the farm onto this primary sort of master activity feed on the home page which Users will utilize to ‘Follow a Friend, Ask a Question; Post an Idea, Follow this Community, etc.’). One can also rework existing team sites to add the social networking activity feeds from the unique Newsgator Social Sites site template code to it, this is known as “"communitizing"” the site with RSS Activity feed.
One might think that this revolutionary functionality would make the OOTB discussion lists obsolete; however, don’t get rid of your team discussion lists just yet. While the Newsgator community activity feeds are great because they have the capability to roll-up across multiple site collections, the data in these feeds does NOT persist (activity feed post usually drops off the after a week by default, can be configured to stay as long as 90 days, but ultimately not designed to stick around longer than that).
SO – if your client wants these social activity feed posts to persist longer than 6 months, or perhaps indefinitely (like mine did) then you are going to need to specify a separate OOTB discussion list for each community’s NG activity feed where feed posts will be archived once they drop off the community feed list. It turns out that while Newsgator Social sites has dramatically enhanced the capability of SharePoint 2010, it does not function in SharePoint as a stand-alone feature…it must have, relies dependently upon, several OOTB web parts as providers or consumers of its activity feed information. Newsgator features such as the ability to find people based upon common interests, follow a friend or community, and like or tag an existing article or document are functions that all fall into the same category of OOTB Web Part dependency, the NG feature doesn’t replace the similar but tamer OOTB SharePoint Profile functionality, instead, it relies on the OOTB lists: “like it,” “tag it,” profile attributes, and “ask a question noteboard in profile” to provide the better web parts unique to Newsgator. Their host’s data (via the Newsgator API) cannot exist or persist without the other lists serving as providers of and containers to the NG displayed data.
Stay tuned for my next Blog post explaining why (from an Information Architecture perspective) you might not want all of the activity feeds to roll-up onto the home page master list (yes the NG cross-site collection roll-up capability is impressive and useful, especially from departmental sub-sites to their LOB or Division Home, in effect their “parent” team site BUT) just because you can push all of the separate activity feed and tagging posts from everywhere in the farm up to the Home Page doesn’t mean You WANT to do that. Sometime “just because I can” is not a valid rationalization for WHY, Why are we doing this, what problem are we trying to solve here, will the resulting solution be useful and useable?...for me as a professional IA for over 14 years now, If were to post a question to this ‘master activity feed’ on the home page – and by the time I got a valid answer back some 24-48 hours later – then there have been 100’s of other posts to the same feed list by then…well I might find it less than useful having to sift through that overwhelming glut of unusable information to get to the specific answer to the one question that I posted earlier, the only one that I really care about.