Social Networking with SharePoint

User Profiles are used by users to describe themselves; job title, skills, interests, etc… User Profiles are used by you to target content and glean insights about your users/members. For example, you can personalize the pages of your site to display an upcoming event to users that are interested in one or more of the event topics. User Profiles are also used by users/members to find the right person.

People Relationships are vital to social networking; after all, that’s kind of the entire point. The ability for a user to build his or her own network of colleagues is a powerful and fundamental must have. It’s common to be able to see colleagues of other users, as well as seeing the social distance between yourself and another person. Users are also accustomed to seeing a list of recommended colleagues. Colleague recommendations are driven by many factors, including social distance and common user profile information.

Search is an obvious one, but worth pointing out because it is another must have. Simply offering up a search box no longer comes close to meeting the user’s expectations. Providing multiple search options is the commonplace with social networking. Easily finding other members and groups falls into the category of critical launch mass. Easily finding discussions, wiki and blog postings based on a specified keyword or phrase, and even based on taxonomy (tags) are also all just expected.

Security is another obvious one. The ability to lock down groups, discussions, wiki and blog posts, etc… is paramount. This extends to the site navigation as well as search results. In other words, if a user does not have ‘read’ permission or greater, he or she shall not be exposed to these pieces of content. Furthermore, your members will expect to be able to control some security aspects themselves. For example, when a user creates a new group, he or she may not want the group to be accessible to all other members, perhaps they want to invite people to the group. Perhaps a user wants to only share his or her job title with colleagues and not the entire community. This is very common and another one that is expected.

Governance is not so obvious but should not be taken lightly. While this one is mainly for your sanity, it can quickly affect the community as a whole. Careful thought and consideration needs to go into your governance plan. Who will be able to do what? Who, if anyone, will monitor content? What do you do if and when inappropriate content shows up? What are the legal ramifications? What about content retention, how long will you keep outdated content? What is outdated content? What will you do with outdated content, notify the author, delete it, move it to an archive site that is searchable? Governance will need to be hammered out. This can be done before you go LIVE, or afterwards, but you can’t run from it for long. It’s a lot easier to get it handled prior to launching.

Those are the must-haves in terms of social networking. Describing the remainder of the vast amount of social networking technologies is out of the scope of this post. Here’s a list of other common capabilities:

SharePoint already has all the fundamental must have components of social networking and many of the others. SharePoint has a User Profile store that can be extended and integrated with your existing user store (CRM, AMS, etc...). This allows you to manage your user accounts in one place, a best practice. SharePoint provides the People Relationship infrastructure with the notion of colleagues and supporting web parts. A best of breed Search Engine is also built in. SharePoint also happens to be DoD 5015.2 certified, so you got Security and Governance covered, even if you do have to do some planning.

The list of things SharePoint already has goes on and on, but what about the things it doesn’t have? That list is considerable easier to digest and can also be easily satisfied with a product I’ll point you to later. Here’s the list of social networking components which are NOT out of the box SharePoint components: Groups, Ratings, Comments, Internal Messaging, Social Distance, People Activity, People Status, Web based Registration/Login/Account Management. That’s a pretty short list, but not one to be ignored.

Your members are used to doing these things with Facebook and LinkedIn and other social media sites. You can go out right now and create a new Group on LinkedIn and start enjoying social networking benefits such as meeting people which are working on similar projects, receiving advice, getting questions answered, answering questions, finding information, etc… , and so can your members, and they are. In fact, at some point they are going to compare the value of your organization against this massive amount of FREE information they are already consuming from social media sites – and they should! Maybe your members can’t distinguish between an experienced certified professional providing advice and someone else claiming to be the same. Either way, your members are enjoying social networking capabilities because social networking provides a simplistic approach to a complicated problem - communication.

You can leverage your existing investment in a world-class platform to provide these social networking capabilities to your members. While I’ve been very clear on the social networking limitations of SharePoint, here’s a product that can get you the rest of the way there! It’s called MemberToMember.

MemberToMember enhances the existing social networking functionality of SharePoint, and provides the missing capabilities like Groups, Ratings, Comments, Internal Messaging, Social Distance, People Activity, People Status, Web based Registration/Login/Account Management, and more.

MemberToMember aims to bridge the gap between what people are used to in terms of social networking capabilities, and the already enormous capability sets of your existing SharePoint platform. It can also be configured to honor your existing SharePoint authentication provider (such as your CRM or AMS or any other Forms Based Authentication Provider). If you don’t already have a non Active Directory user store based authentication provider, it provides one for you - out of the box.

Beyond providing social networking capabilities to your members, you are capitalizing on your previously made wise decision to go with a world-class platform in the first place – it will grow with your organization, even in tough economic times.

Based on social networking industry leaders like LinkedIn

MemberToMember enhances SharePoint, it adds to it. It has been developed using industry best practices by a Certified Microsoft Gold Partner, so it will grow with SharePoint, which in turn - grows with your organization. Don’t lose sight of the fact that this product sits on top of SharePoint, which means all those SharePoint capabilities are there if you want them. Again, Microsoft invests heavily in SharePoint – in fact, they have budged $1 Billion annual R&D for the next release, which means it will have undergone about 2.5 Billion R&D just for the next version. This is, at least to me, a no brainer – especially if you already have SharePoint.

It is important to understand your audience and what they consist of. Are they bloggers? Are they critics (providing ratings and comments). Are they spectators (quietly consuming information every day)? How many question askers vs. question answerers are you looking at? Have you considered Governance issues?

MemberToMember provides easy to use social networking capibilities for your members and leverages your existing SharePoint investment.

Once you figure out your audience, you will have a solid understanding of what your social networking solution will include. Hammer out your Governance issues if you haven’t done so already, and have a plan for initializing your social networking site. In other words, who’s going to initially provide the content, blog posts, start discussions, answer discussion questions, etc… What is the plan moving forward? If you already have SharePoint, you already have the infrastructure in place. Once you have this sorted out, slap on MemberToMember, and welcome your organization to the future of human interaction and apologize to your members for taking so long ;)

MemberToMember enhances SharePoint and provides a list based user store, including login page, registration with email confirmation, forgot password andremember me functionality.