Think Web 2.0 is all about Social Networking and the Personalized Taxonomy? Your mileage may vary.
We’ve all heard the hype about the dramatically improved Social Networking tools within SharePoint 2010, but what does it really mean to implement these tools in a corporate intranet environment? How does the use of Social Networking tools change the site structure and page layouts /page flow strategy from a SharePoint design perspective?
First thing you’ll want to understand is “what are these social networking tools and how do they extend & enhance the functionality of SP 2010 as compared to MOSS 2007?”
It helps me when designing large enterprise site structures as an information architect to think about SharePoint’s development components as rolling up into what is essentially three separate spheres of application development influence: My Sites apps for individual Personalization, Publishing Sites or CMS apps for Internally Public Facing content distribution, and Team Collaboration apps for Joint Authoring solutions around document libraries, discussion lists, and team & task mgmt. (typically deployed in a members-only context for use by many Contributing team members).
What Microsoft has done really well for 2010 (from a social networking perspective) is to extend many of the ‘cool’ social features like Interactive Blogs and Noteboard messaging from the personal sphere into the team sphere. We’ll forgive them the fact that during the beta period of 2010’s release schedule their ‘progressive thinking’ was to do away with the existing Teamsite template from 2007, replacing it with what was essentially a wiki site (plus document library) renamed as the new OOTB “Teamsite” template. I think it rapidly became apparent that this oversimplified concept of a team site (just give ‘em a wiki and call it a teamsite) wasn’t really going to meet anyone’s enterprise Business Networking or Team and Task mgmt. needs OOTB, so we were all going to have to re-create and save our own customized team site templates in order to get what was required by our target audience out that product.
What MS ultimately did unleash on us, the SP Developers and Users Community, when the RTM finally come out was a much more well thought out and practical package of Social Networking features made available within a Team Collaboration environment, thus facilitating communications among team members who are more and more typically spread out across geographically dispersed WANs and even across the Globe.
Features like an OOTB people search, micro-blogging capabilities via ‘ask me about’ tied to enhanced noteboard messaging, tags & notes, what’s new web part, my colleagues web part with people’s photos and status in a feed, improved colleague to org structure mapping, and the ability to, in effect, ‘follow a friend’ by adding your own favorite colleagues overlaid on top of the corp. org structure via the ‘In-Common with You’ functionality.
These Social Networking features primarily originated from the My site/My Profile capabilities, but are now exposed to collective team environment via the “My Content / My Host” data made available thru what some are calling the ‘Social Database’, or my host data feed - basically a store of common person data shared across all ‘My Sites’ Site Collections (which you should note or know from past MOSS 2007 experience, everyone’s individual my site is actually a separate site collection with its own individual DB). So now that you know what SP 2010 DOES DO in the way of Social Networking, it’s also important to recognize its limitations so that you can accurately tell clients NO when they ask for something that’s NOT Available in 2010 that they may have preconceived as easily do-able best practice “Social Networking” functionality.
Sometimes not do-able means it requires heavy developer customization, worst case scenario it means these customer wants are impractical even despite allocation of many customization scoped hours. Remember the three spheres of development influence that I referred to earlier in this article? I’m referring to the Personalization (My Sites), CMS (Publishing), and Collaboration (Team Sites). So far We have validated and are enjoying the creative freedom found in the fact that we can now extend some of the best parts of the personal sphere into the team sphere. What Microsoft hasn’t done (and what customers are still persistently asking for) is to extend the personal sphere onto the Portal Entry page (which is, in effect a publishing site leveraging CMS), we’re talking about making the top-level entry point or HOME page of you enterprise portal into a User’s personalized Social Networking launching point.
More and more people are asking us “Can You make my personal My Site page replace the corp. home page; or else, at least expose my site personalized web parts on the Intranet Home?” After having researched this and experimented with the various options several times (both as an independent consulting team and in collaboration with MS Architects on join ventures), we have determined that the answer, sadly, is No. Due to performance reasons and the need to make allowances for the consideration of quick page download times, the first answer is No you don’t want to re-direct 1000’s of users on entry to their own individual ‘My site’ home page as it forces upside down the SP logical architectural model which provides a triangular or pyramidal framework mapping to the governance pyramid…where we find Publishing Sites at the Top of the Pyramid, Team Collaboration Sites in the Middle, and 1000’s of Separate individual my Sites site collections nestled down at the bottom of this iceberg.
And the second answer, again is No, it’s also not practical to feature staple or expose “My Sites” web parts onto the internally public facing corporate home page, a publishing page. It’s not that it’s not technologically feasible; It can be done but is also inadvisable because of the ugly branching issues and roll-back concerns associated with forcing deployment of a packed personalization solution that doesn’t live within the personalization sphere of influence. In other words, while the Company typically wants to feature staple a couple of internal marketing web parts on the home page together with you’re my Site personal web parts (so that stuff like CEO’s Corner, and Company News get pushed down to the user on the home page along with his/her personal content). The next things that will typically happen are that corp. marketing decides that they want to make a change, maybe revise, add or delete a web part from their ‘pushed down group’ and then only newly deployed users get the new version of the feature stapled home page, else we force the new version down to everyone thus simultaneously restoring their my site content web content to a pristine rolled-back state (empty of all the personal content you’ve worked so hard to add).
So what’s the solution you Say? It can’t be that hard you say!, well there is a happy answer…if you want to integrate personalized content and social networking activity feeds onto the top-level entry pg. or corporate home page, then the best way to do it is to integrate SP 2010 with Newsgator Social Sites 1.2 and then you can have the best of both worlds: Facebook-like micro-blogging with roll-ups of Social Networking / Activity feeds on Your corp. Home from Community Home pages and OOTB MS enhanced Team Collaboration / Business Networking on you Team & Project sites.
More on Newsgator integration considerations in my next Blog post “Social Networking vs. Business Networking: There is a time and Place for Both”