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Evaluate social computing for business needs in SharePoint Server 2013Microsoft CorporationAugust 2013Applies to: SharePoint Server 2013Summary: SharePoint Server 2013 offers social computing features to facilitate discovery, coordination, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and discussion among employees in an enterprise.

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Evaluate social computing for business needs in SharePoint Server 2013 August 2013

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ContentsIntroduction............................................................................................................................. 3

Success with social computing and collaboration....................................................4Employee Engagement 4

Team collaboration 4

Connected organizations 5

Business Agility 5

Steps for success with social computing and collaboration 5

An example of social computing in the enterprise...................................................6

Business needs addressed by social computing and collaboration...............30Locating people and expertise 32

Sharing knowledge and expertise 32

Organizing information for a specific group 33

Collaborating on content with others 34

Cultivating a personal view of information 34

Interacting informally 35

Storing and sharing files 36

Highly dynamic / very current information 36

Persistent knowledge management 37

Social features overview..................................................................................................39User Profiles 39

Social feeds 40

Personal sites (also known as “My Sites”) 40

Community sites 42

Team sites and project sites 42

Blogs 43

Wikis 43


Additional resources.......................................................................................................... 44


Evaluate social computing for business needs in SharePoint Server 2013IntroductionSharePoint Server 2013 offers social computing features to facilitate discovery, coordination, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and discussion among employees in an enterprise. At the core, social computing is the technological framework for personal networking and collaboration. Social computing revolves around the people in an organization, and it provides a way for those people to connect, engage, and collaborate. These features help the business be more agile, break down silos, and foster innovation. For more information about the business value and importance of enterprise social computing, see the Rise of Enterprise Social Networks and the Yammer social journey.

While all of the SharePoint Server features together provide a strong, integrated social solution, you should evaluate each of the features individually to determine which of them you need and when to implement them in your organization. Though it might be tempting to implement everything at once, you might find that your business requires only some of the social features, or that you would benefit from phasing in parts of the solution over a period of time.

This article discusses the social features available in SharePoint Server 2013 from the perspective of business needs and their potential value to help you build your social solution. Once you determine which features you need for your organization, use the additional overview and planning articles in the user profile and identities section and the social computing and collaboration section on Microsoft TechNet to delve further into each area and plan accordingly for their implementation.

Our recommendation for SharePoint Server 2013 on-premises customers is to use Yammer. Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we're committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products. This summer, we provided on-premises customers the ability to choose Yammer for their social © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 3 of 46

To comment on this paper or request more documentation about these features, contact the Microsoft Office and Servers Team at [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662531.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219651.aspx


http://about.yammer.com/social-journey/

http://aka.ms/rise-of-enterprise-social-networks

http://aka.ms/rise-of-enterprise-social-networks


experience by (1) providing specific guidance on how to replace SharePoint social capabilities, and (2) delivered a Yammer app for SharePoint Server to easily embed Yammer groups into SharePoint sites; read this latest roadmap for additional information as integration and innovation will be ongoing. However, for customers that aren’t able to consider the multi-tenant cloud services for enterprise social, this white paper focuses on the SharePoint Server 2013 capabilities for social computing. For the latest and greatest information on enterprise social, SharePoint, Office 365, and Yammer innovation, make sure to keep up-to-date with the SharePoint blog.

Success with social computing and collaborationThough businesses can vary in many ways, there are several areas that most have in common when it comes to leveraging social computing: increasing employee engagement, improving team collaboration, building a connected organization, and enhancing business agility.

Employee EngagementEngaged employees are enthusiastic about their work, they are fully involved in the way an organization works, and they act in a way that furthers the goals of the organization; in other words, they’re doing everything they can to help make a company successful.

Social technologies enable companies to remove communication barriers and help employees have a real voice in making the company better. This voice can be heard at all levels and across all geographies. Engaged employees are more productive and satisfied, improving profits and decreasing turnover.

Social technologies provide more than just tools for simple conversations. They provide employees with the tools to drive positive change across the company.

Team collaborationTeam collaboration drives innovative companies, and today’s companies need to move quickly in order to compete. To do that their teams need to connect, learn from each other, share knowledge, and work together from locations around the world.

Social technologies enable teams to be more productive by making it simple to coordinate tasks among team members, share information, find people, and talk and see each other around the world.

© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 4 of 46



http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/

http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/06/24/advancing-the-enterprise-social-roadmap-june-2013.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn270535.aspx


Connected organizationsConnected Organizations is about taking the ‘traditional’ intranet, and making it more dynamic with social technologies. The primary purpose of a traditional intranet is to access content and other applications. They tend to have controlled approaches to content authoring and content management.

Adding social capabilities enables bottom-up creation of content and allows anyone to engage in interactive dialogs around that content. In many ways, the engagement around content is as important as the content itself because it gives content a lifespan that’s much longer than just the time it’s promoted on the intranet. It also provides feedback and discussion mechanisms that help to improve the organization.

Social technologies help the intranet come alive and provide a unique perspective that is based on each employee’s social network. When combined with the powerful content tools in SharePoint Server, you have the next generation of social computing in the enterprise.

Business AgilityWhether it’s an exciting acquisition, new product launch, or reorganization, it’s more important than ever for companies to be agile. Companies need to quickly innovate and respond to customer needs so that they can outperform competitors, propel a company’s growth, and increase shareholder value.

Social technologies enable broad communication across the company at all levels. Employees can connect with others quickly and efficiently. Companies use social to engage and energize their people, while driving great communication and involvement.

Steps for success with social computing and collaborationCustomers who successfully use social computing in their organizations have the following in common:

1. Vision. They clarify their vision for social computing, ensuring that business goals are addressed and that they can articulate how social computing will help them to work better.

2. Sponsorship. They identify sponsors and champions to help drive adoption of the social solution.3. Integration. They integrate the social platform across their line of business applications and into

their daily, internal processes.4. Monitoring. They monitor the progress of social computing by appointing community managers,

continuing to drive engagement, and analyzing the network with quantitative and qualitative techniques.





An example of social computing in the enterpriseThe SharePoint Server 2013 platform offers new functionality and features to help people be engaged, connected, agile, and collaborative within the business. The following business example will walk you through how social computing and collaboration in SharePoint Server can address business needs.

The new social experience starts with the newsfeed page. The newsfeed is the place that users go throughout the day to manage and share documents, create sites, and discover new people, sites, tags, and documents. The newsfeed provides a rich microblog experience for employees to interact with one another, and discover information to keep them up-to-date on everything their co-workers are doing.





For example, Garth is a web marketing manager at Contoso, Ltd. He has an upcoming marketing event where he will present about a new XT series product that they are launching. He’d like input from others who have also given presentations, so he posts to his newsfeed to solicit help. Anyone who is following Garth will see his post and can reply accordingly.

Garth’s co-worker, Zrinka, responds that she can attend the event, and mentions another co-worker, Molly, who is also available. She tags the post with #UpcomingEvents so that it will show up in other co-workers’ newsfeeds if they are following that tag. Molly is notified that she has been mentioned in a conversation, and checks it out. She replies with a tip about how to book the facility. Garth opens up more options for her response, and clicks Follow up to add an Outlook task corresponding to Molly’s response.





Garth decides to see what else has been tagged with the #UpcomingEvents tag. When he clicks on the tag from Zrinka’s response, he goes to the tag page to see conversations with that tag. When he hovers over a conversation, he can see more information and even click to view the actual conversation. He decides to follow the tag so that he will see any other posts that are tagged with #UpcomingEvents in his newsfeed.





Garth returns to his newsfeed and wants to know more about Molly. He clicks her name to see her profile page to learn more about her interests and activities, which include posts, replies, documents and sites she follows, and much more. Garth sees that many of Molly’s interests coincide with his, so he decides to follow her.

Following is a fundamental capability in SharePoint Server 2013. It’s a way to help narrow what’s most interesting to you as a user. The challenge with many social solutions is discoverability. Specifically, how do you know who to follow? SharePoint Server makes this easier by suggesting users to follow. And it’s not limited to people. You can follow a site, a document, or even a hash tag, as Garth just did. With one click you’ll always have the latest information delivered to your newsfeed. SharePoint Server 2013 has even integrated the new unified Search engine to create custom recommendations on who or what you should be following. Garth sees that Molly’s interests coincide with his, so he follows her. Back on his newsfeed, he can review the full list of people that he is following, including Molly, and take a quick peek at their most recent conversations.





Garth returns to his newsfeed and sees that the number of people he is following has increased. He clicks the number to see the people he is following. He can also see who is following him. He sees the most recent posts from everyone he’s following, and can expand their recent activities to see what else they are up to. He expands Alex’s activities to see more about what Alex is doing.





Garth realizes that he needs a team site to have a central location to collaborate on and organize information about the launch event. He goes to the Sites hub and creates a new site just specifying a site name. Since this is a site he created, it will automatically appear in the Sites I’m following area on his Sites hub.





Once Garth’s site is created, he reviews the actions in the new Get started with your site area. He can use these tiles to perform quick customizations such as adding apps or changing the branding.

He clicks the Working on a deadline tile to convert this team site into a project site.





This creates a task list, calendar, and project summary, all of which will be useful in planning activities around the launch event.





Molly and Zrinka are key contributors to Garth’s presentation, so he shares the site with both of them. As he begins typing their names, they appear in the drop down list for him to select. He gives them member permission so that they can add content and tasks as needed.





To get Molly and Zrinka involved in his project, Garth assigns tasks to each of them. Using the task list he just created, all he needs to do is specify a task name, a due date, and to whom the task is assigned.





The first task Garth added is highlighted automatically on the timeline, which provides a graphical interface for viewing all project assignments. He can add subsequent tasks to the timeline by using the Tasks ribbon command.





Garth’s team site has a newsfeed that he and other site members can use to start targeted conversations about their project. He posts a thank you message to the team.





Garth returns to his personal newsfeed and sees that several new activities were added, including following Molly and the site he created, as well as the post he created on his team site newsfeed.





Garth then goes to his My Tasks page, which rolls up tasks across all of his sites. He can edit his tasks here or take them offline by syncing to Outlook.





Organizations have a lot of tacit knowledge, but so much of it gets lost because it is either too hard to find or no one shares it in the first place. SharePoint Server 2013 makes sharing information easier than ever. A great example of this is the new Communities feature. You can discover new communities from the newsfeed, from co-workers who are members, through a community portal, or even through the search engine by simply asking a question.

Garth goes to his Sites hub and clicks the Communities tile to go to the Community Portal.





The Community Portal





Communities help to facilitate discussion. Users can post questions and replies, and moderators can quickly identify a best reply.





Garth navigates to a discussion he started about the XT2000 ad campaign, and he sees that a few users have already responded. The one from Janet is his favorite, so he marks that as a best reply, which then features that response at the top of the discussion.





With the connected platform of SharePoint Server 2013, all of this content is fully searchable, making the information inside the community available past the active conversation.

SharePoint Server 2013 Search makes it easier than ever for users to find and act on information in the enterprise. Search is all about discovering and organizing relevant information, managing the results, and taking action.

Garth’s launch presentation is about a new product, the XT2000. He would like some background information about the XT series, so he does a query about the previous product, the XT1000.





Narrowing down Garth’s search will be pretty easy. He can filter by the class of result (for example, people, videos, etc.). He can also refine results by document type and author, and there is even a graphical refiner for the last modified date.





Garth can get an active preview by pausing on the link for each search result. In this preview, he can view associated metadata or even scroll through the document. The Administrator Guide document looks like something useful, so he will download a copy. When he filters results by people, he can see all the users that have had some involvement with the XT1000. Not surprisingly, Molly had a past project for that product.





Now that he has downloaded what he needs, he returns to his project site. He already has a couple of other related documents about the XT series, so he drags them and the administrator guide to the Documents library.





One of Garth’s project team members, Molly, responds to the task that he gave her earlier. She has already put together a draft agenda, so she drags that document to the project site. She then navigates to the site newsfeed. By following the site, Molly can see active conversations, including the one Garth started earlier that thanked everyone for helping. Molly responds with an @ mention and lets Garth know that her draft agenda has been uploaded to the site.





We mentioned the integration of SharePoint Server with Outlook earlier. Now, we will see it in practice. In Garth’s user profile, he can specify what types of email notifications he can receive based on certain social events. He can get notifications when someone starts following him, or, as in this case, when someone mentions him in a post.

In Outlook, Garth also has integration with SharePoint task lists. He can synchronize all tasks between SharePoint Server and Outlook from his My Tasks page. This will also synchronize Project Server tasks if he is using Project Server. Tasks will be editable in Outlook from the Tasks tab. Since he has already reviewed the draft XT2000 pitchbook, he will mark that task as complete. This task is now updated both in Outlook and SharePoint Server.





Social in SharePoint Server 2013 puts people at the center of the business, making sure that employees, customers, and partners can connect with the people and information they need for one simple goal: Get Work Done. Garth returns to his project site, where he can see the draft agenda uploaded by Molly. In the newsfeed, he posts one final message thanking everyone for their help. Thanks to SharePoint Server 2013, he has a single place to manage and develop social applications.

Business needs addressed by social computing and collaborationNow that you have an idea of how social and collaboration work in SharePoint Server 2013, you’ll want to start deciding which features will help your business needs. This section helps you understand which social features are best suited to help with various business needs. Some features are clearly meant to solve a specific business need, while others might offer a partial solution. You can evaluate these options with other stakeholders to determine the features that best suit your business needs, and develop a plan for their implementation.

The following table provides a summary of which social features address various business needs. Each of these business needs is discussed in further detail in this paper, with links to additional information about the related features.





Business need

User profiles

Social feeds

Community sites

Team sites

Project sites

Blogs Wikis Document libraries / OneDrive for Business

Locating people & expertise

Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No

Sharing knowledge & expertise

No Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No

Organizing information for a specific group

No No Partial Yes Yes Partial Partial Yes

Collaborating on content with others

No Partial Yes Yes Yes Partial Yes Partial

Cultivating a personal view of information

No Yes No No No No No Yes

Interacting informally

No Yes Yes No No Partial Partial No

Storing and sharing files

No No No Yes Yes No No Yes

Highly dynamic / very current information

No Yes Partial No No Partial Partial No

Persistent knowledge management

No No Yes Yes Partial Partial Yes Yes





Locating people and expertiseRelated social features:

User profiles Social feeds Community sites Blogs Wikis

SharePoint social features provide many ways for users to search for and locate people and expertise within their organization. Each user has a user profile that contains properties that define the user. The data for these properties can come from existing business systems while others are provided by the users themselves. When users want to locate people they know or someone with a certain set of skills or other criteria, SharePoint search provides people results with links to user profiles.

Social feeds, community sites, blogs, and wikis provide a way for serendipitous discovery of people and expertise. When a user starts following people, they begin to see others comment and interact with people they are following in their newsfeed. This helps uncover other people they might want to follow or interact with. With community sites, users interact with one another through discussions, and find other people who have similar interests or needs. As a user builds up interactions in the community, their reputation grows and people begin to stand out as experts. You can also identify users with gifted badges who have special status in the community. With blogs and wikis, users who are contributing to the knowledge base tend to be experts in the area they write about.

Sharing knowledge and expertiseRelated social features:

Social feeds Community sites Blogs Wikis

Social feeds, community sites, blogs, and wikis are good features for sharing knowledge and expertise. They give users a way to communicate easily with a broad group of people in an organization, and to build up knowledge for others to find and use. Social feeds and community sites are conversational and dynamic in nature. With social feeds, information is always very current and older information is pushed out of the feed as new items come in. For this reason, social feeds are good for sharing information that does not need a long lifespan. If you want to keep the conversational approach but have that © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 33 of 46




information more easily accessible, you can use community sites to facilitate discussions and use search to find older information.

Blogs and wikis are both useful for sharing information with others. With blogs, one or more authors contribute to the blog and newer posts start to push older posts off of the front page. Users can still search within the blog to find older information, but it’s good for keeping users apprised of current information. With wikis, the pages are directly editable and can be updated over time to keep information current. It’s a good way to keep information fresh as subject areas change and develop over time, and keep things for a longer period of time as needed.

Organizing information for a specific groupRelated social features:

Team sites Project sites Document libraries / OneDrive for Business Community sites Blogs Wikis

Team sites, project sites, and document libraries (including OneDrive for Business) are excellent options for organizing and storing information for a group. You can add SharePoint apps to sites, such as calendars, lists, and document libraries. These apps are useful for organizing meetings, discussions, documents, lists, and other information that pertains to the group. Users can use OneDrive for Business to work on documents offline and sync them with their online storage, and share documents from their personal libraries when they want to collaborate with others.

Because community sites, blogs, and wikis can also include SharePoint apps, you can add various apps to organize group information, but these types of sites are less structured than team sites and project sites. Depending on your needs, you might just add a calendar or document library to one of these or decide to create a team site or project site that is specific for the group’s needs.





Collaborating on content with othersRelated social features:

Community sites Team sites Project sites Wikis Social feeds Blogs Document libraries / OneDrive for Business

Community sites, team sites, project sites, and wikis offer great functionality for collaborating on content with other people. With community sites, knowledge builds up over time as the members contribute to discussions, and rate posts and replies. Content is searchable and organized by discussion and category, and members build up reputation over time helping other members evaluate the level of expertise a member has in a particular community or category. Team sites and project sites provide a place for a group to center around a common purpose, and provide document libraries that users can store and collaborate on content with others who have access to the site. With wikis, a group of people can create wiki pages and collaborate on the content that fills those pages. The rich text editor provides an easy editing interface for users to contribute knowledge and change things over time.

Social feeds, blogs, and document libraries can provide some collaboration capabilities. With social feeds, users can ask questions or post information on their microblog and ask for feedback from those who follow their feeds. With blogs, users can provide feedback and have discussions in the comments section on a blog post. Depending on how active the blog members are, these comments can develop into good sources of information. Document libraries, when used with Office Web Apps, can provide a powerful solution for co-authoring documents and contributing to files stored in the library. With document versioning and permissions, you can track the history of the file over time.

Cultivating a personal view of informationRelated social features:

Social feeds OneDrive for Business / personal sites

Within an organization, it is useful for employees to have a way to cultivate their own stream of information to keep up-to-date. Social feeds and personal sites provide a good option for this by providing a newsfeed for users to have conversations, and a personal site to store things about what they care to © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 35 of 46




follow, including people, documents, and sites. OneDrive for Business provides a personal library where users can store their documents, and choose to share them with others in their organization. The user profile on the About Me page provides a place for users to have an online persona consisting of business data and their own data.

Interacting informallyRelated social features:


Social feeds provide the best solution for users to interact with one another informally. Social feeds enable users to post about things they care about and receive feedback from those who comment on their posts. These create a digital solution for conversations with a much more light-weight experience than sending an email. It also enables other people who follow the user to see his or her posts and benefit from the information shared in the conversation. This experience mimics the “hallway” or “water cooler” conversations that go on in businesses that can become more difficult as the workforce is spread out among different floors, buildings, or locations. These conversations often provide a way for users to share and discover useful information that they might not learn another way.

Community sites are similar to social feeds in purpose for knowledge sharing, because they center on discussions while social feeds center on conversations. Because community sites are based on discussions, they can be informal or formal depending on the context. For example, you might have a community that focuses on hobbies or group activities, such as photography or charitable endeavors, or you might have a community that is specifically for work-related activities, such as role-based or support-based communities. Each community can set the tone and the level of formality based on the way the site owner sets up the site. They can change the look and feel of the site, and update the verbiage of the text about the community to specify the community rules.

Blogs and wikis are also possibilities for more informal communication depending on the purpose they are meant to serve, but they are less interactive than social feeds and community sites. You might choose them for interactive, informal needs if you want multiple people to contribute to a body of knowledge, or have experts contribute to a blog and interact with people who comment on their posts.

Storing and sharing filesRelated social features:





Team sites Project sites Document libraries / OneDrive for Business

Users can store and share files in document libraries from any SharePoint site, including team sites, project sites, and their OneDrive for Business document library in their personal sites (“My Sites”). Sharing is based on the same permissions infrastructure as SharePoint Server 2010, but simplifies and improves the user experience. By using this simplified experience, users can specify permissions for a specific document without having to understand the inheritance model.

When deployed, a user’s OneDrive for Business document library is the default save location for files saved from Office 2013 client applications. Users have the option to synchronize their online OneDrive for Business content with a local drive to enable offline access to documents. This option encourages the use of the OneDrive for Business document library for storage instead of the users’ local drives because it offers flexibility for users to work with documents in both online and offline scenarios. By using SharePoint Server for document storage, items can be managed, governed, and shared. This helps reduce the amount of content that is stored in other systems, such as in email or on personal drives.

By default, a user’s OneDrive for Business content is restricted to the user, and other users cannot see content unless it is shared with them. If the user wants others to collaborate on a piece of content in that library, the user can share the content with specific users or groups, and select the permission those users or groups have to the content.

Highly dynamic / very current informationRelated social features:


Social feeds are the best solution for users to see the most current information. They are highly dynamic and specific, displaying information that a user cares most about based on the people he or she follows. The user keeps up-to-date with people’s activities, such as conversations that they’re having or documents and sites that they’re using. The user can also access the Everyone view to see the most current activities and posts from all people, not just people they are following. They can use this view to discover new people to follow or learn what people outside their following network are discussing. The rate of change in a user’s feed depends heavily on the number of people he or she follows and the amount of activities the people in their network generate. The more active a user’s network is, the more his or her feed will contain new information and activities.





Community sites, wikis, and blogs are also possible solutions for surfacing current and dynamic information. If a Community Site has an active and enthusiastic member base to drive discussions, the resulting content will be fresh. Wikis grow over time, and if the contributors are invested in keeping the information up-to-date, the wiki can be a good location to find current information. Blogs, by their nature, are organized with the most recent content first, and if the blog author or authors create posts regularly, the blog can be a good resource for current information. The value of each of these solutions really relies heavily on the investment that the users have in keeping the information fresh.

Persistent knowledge managementRelated social features:

Community sites Wikis Team sites Document libraries / OneDrive for Business Project sites Blogs

Community sites, wikis, team sites, and document libraries are good choices to collect and persist knowledge in your organization. The option you choose depends heavily on how organized and structured you want to store the information, and how you expect people to contribute their knowledge to the solution.

Community sites revolve around discussions, and are the least structured and most conversational option for knowledge retention. With community sites, members can contribute to discussions with others who have similar interests and needs. Because community sites are searchable, members can easily find older discussions and benefit from the knowledge base that builds within the community over time. They can easily see which posts are most active, find posts marked as best replies, and review the history of a particular discussion. The value of a community site lies mainly in the number of members and the amount of participation those members have in the community. The more active a community is, the more information will be available to members. They are best suited for mass collaboration of ongoing interests or topic areas that have few, if any, timelines.

Wikis are another way to collect and organize information, but they are slightly more structured than community sites and revolve around pages in a wiki library. They are a good collaborative option for a group of people to easily create pages for topics related to a subject area, and use the rich text editor to add and edit information directly to those pages. As the wiki’s subject area changes over time, users can edit pages to accommodate new information or delete information that is no longer pertinent. If a user overwrites a page or makes a mistake, you can use versioning to go back to an earlier version of the wiki





page. Users link to other wiki pages to create a web of related information throughout the wiki. Like community sites, wikis are best suited for subject areas that are ongoing and have few, if any, timelines.

Though community sites and wikis provide ways to accumulate knowledge, they are not as structured as team sites and document libraries. Team sites revolve around a group of people with a similar purpose, such as people who report to the same manager or share the same role. They are a more comprehensive solution for collecting and collaborating on information. Team sites are very flexible in terms of the web parts and apps that you want to make available to users. For example, you can add discussion lists, calendars, document libraries, and even wikis to team sites. Generally, as the team progresses from one project to another, older information can be archived or deleted as needs change. The team site is fairly permanent and a central location for users to keep information.

Document libraries can be added to any SharePoint site, and they are a good way to organize documents and files in folders. Document libraries can include columns to track metadata on files, and versioning to make sure that important files are not overwritten. They are also a good place to put documents that you want to share and co-author with others.

Project sites have similar benefits as team sites, but they tend to be less permanent, and are less suited to knowledge management. They generally exist for the timeline of a particular project, but are abandoned when the project is completed. Though they are searchable and can continue to be referred to after a project, the information grows stale and becomes less valuable as other projects start.

Blogs can be another way to capture information, but they are less collaborative in the sense that blog posts are written by one author. You can have multiple authors on a blog, but they are generally limited to a specific user or group of users who have expertise to share with a larger audience. The audience can participate with comments on blog posts. Blogs tend to be timeline based and similar to journaling, where information gets buried in older posts as time goes on. They might be a good option for knowledge management if you have a group of experts who want to contribute expertise to others rather than collaborate on information.

Social features overviewUser Profiles

User profiles are the foundation for all users in SharePoint Server 2013. A user profile represents each user’s identity in the SharePoint system and contains a collection of properties that define © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 39 of 46




each user. Though a user profile might be as simple as a user name, full name, and some other business information such as phone number or job title, the real value of profiles comes from a combination of business properties that further describe the person and enable the user to further define him or herself with personal properties.

In the social context, people and their profiles are important in several ways:

Each person has a SharePoint profile page, accessed from the About Me page on their personal site (also known as a “My Site”). This page displays information provided by the business, such as directories and line-of-business systems, and supplied by the person themselves. This collection of properties defines each user in the SharePoint environment.

SharePoint search uses people and expertise properties from user profiles to return people search results.

Social interactions in the SharePoint environment center on people. For example, by following people in your newsfeed, you cultivate a personal view of information that is useful to you based on people whose activities you’re interested in.

The people card used in Lync 2013, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013 link to the user’s profile page and provide an easy way to choose how to interact with a user.

Because user profiles are central to user identities, and subsequently social capabilities in SharePoint Server 2013, they should be the basis for your planning and implementation. For more information, see Plan user profiles and identities (SharePoint Server 2013).

Social feeds

Personal sites (also known as “My Sites”) and team sites contain social feeds to help users interact with one another through microblogging activities. These activities include user posts and system-generated activities based on what a user is following.

On a user’s personal newsfeed, the user can select different views to see information in different ways. For example, a user can use the Following view to see only information that is related to people and items they are following, or they might use the Everyone view to see all activities across the company. The personal newsfeed includes the following views: Following, Everyone, Mentions, Activities, and Likes.

With a site newsfeed, only people who have permission to the site can see posts. Site newsfeeds give people a way to discuss information related to the site without exposing the conversations to anyone who does not have access.






For more information, see Plan for social computing and collaboration in SharePoint Server 2013.

Personal sites (also known as “My Sites”)

My Sites are well suited for individual users to promote their profile information, save and share personal documents, build networks of people, follow content and sites of interest, keep up-to-date on relevant information in feeds, and participate in microblogging activities. Some parts of the My Site are more lasting than others, such as document storage and profiles, whereas other parts are briefer, such as items in feeds.

About MeSee the user profile section above.

Newsfeed hubSee the social feeds section above.

OneDrive for Business hubOneDrive for Business is your professional library—the place to keep your work documents and other files. You can think of OneDrive for Business as your OneDrive for Business. When you store your files on OneDrive for Business, only you can see them, but you can easily share them with co-workers and access them from your mobile devices. Your files are safely kept in the cloud with SharePoint Online or on your company’s SharePoint Server 2013 servers, depending on what your company has set up. In addition, with the OneDrive for Business client application, you can synchronize library files and folders with your local computer to work on them offline.

OneDrive for Business lets you:

Store and organize your private documents and other files in a secure location in the cloud or on your company’s servers that are running SharePoint Server 2013.

Share files and folders with other people in your organization and give them permission to review or edit the content.

Synchronize files and folders in your OneDrive for Business and other SharePoint libraries with your computer or mobile devices, so you can access your content offline.

Sites hubIf you find a SharePoint Server 2013 site in your organization that you want to access again, you can follow it to keep it handy. In addition, people who follow you get an update in their newsfeed about the site © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Page 41 of 46





you’ve started following. This helps build your reputation as a collaborator—without any extra work from you. So following a site is similar to ‘liking’ it but with some added benefits.

Once you start following a site, you can:

Find the site easily in your list of followed sites. See activity from the site feed in your own newsfeed. Share your find through an automatic newsfeed post that people who follow you can see.


Community sites

Communities provide a forum experience in the SharePoint environment. They are well suited for mass collaboration initiatives, where a broad group of people participate in sharing knowledge and learning from other people across organizational and hierarchical boundaries. Communities promote open communication and information exchange by enabling people to share their expertise and seek help from others who have knowledge in specific areas of interest. They are a persistent form of knowledge collection and storage. They provide moderation and reputation within the community.


Team sites and project sites

Team sites are well suited for distinct groups of users to collaborate and store information that is common to the team, such as documents and calendars. They are generally used within organizational hierarchies, and generally have more permanence than project sites. They are targeted to specific users.

Project sites are well suited for distinct groups of users who are working together on a specific project, although these users might span organizational hierarchies. They generally exist only for the life of a project, and might be discarded or archived when the project is completed.







For more information, see Collaboration site planning in SharePoint Server 2010. Note that although this topic is written for SharePoint Server 2010, the concepts continue to apply to SharePoint Server 2013.

Blogs

Blogs are well suited for an individual user or a small group of users to share knowledge and expertise with others. Blogs are organized by date, with the most current blog post displayed first and all subsequent posts listed from most to least current. Blog authors can assign various categories, or tags, to each blog entry to help with organization and discovery. SharePoint blogs use a rich text editor to help bloggers easily create posts.

Blogs are searchable with SharePoint search and users can follow the blog site. Users can leave comments on blog posts, and the blog author can manage those comments as needed. SharePoint blog posts do not support @mentions, hash tags, earned reputation, or moderation.

For more information, see Collaboration site planning in SharePoint Server 2010. Note that although this topic is written for SharePoint Server 2010, the concepts continue to apply to SharePoint Server 2013.

Wikis

A wiki is a web site that a group of users can easily contribute to and edit any page in the wiki library. Wikis are a good solution for mass collaboration needs. The wiki site is low maintenance and grows organically by linking pages together to create a library of knowledge. Information that users typically exchange in email, meetings, and informal conversations can be maintained in context with similar knowledge. You might use them for brainstorming, tracking procedures and steps, collaborating on projects, and other business needs that require building an encyclopedia of knowledge. Any user with permission can edit a wiki page, so wikis are best for information that tends to evolve over time. If you have a need to track the information as it changes, you might consider versioning so that older copies of a wiki page are available. Like blogs, users can follow the wiki site but wiki pages do not support @mentions, hash tags, earned reputation, or moderation. Wikis are open for editing by the group, so moderation tends to happen via the wiki community at large instead of as a specific role unless assigned by the business.




http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262388(v=office.14).aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262388(v=office.14).aspx


For more information, see Enterprise wikis overview in SharePoint Server 2010 and Enterprise wikis planning in SharePoint Server 2010. Note that although these articles are written for SharePoint Server 2010, the concepts continue to apply to SharePoint Server 2013.

Additional resourcesWhat’s new in social computing in SharePoint Server 2013Scenario: Personal Sites (My Sites) in SharePoint Server 2013SharePoint customer storiesEnterprise Social Customer SuccessYammer Accelerates Momentum Following Microsoft Acquisition Yammer Announces Message Translation to Ignite Multilingual CollaborationYammer and Dynamics CRM integrationSharePoint blog & Yammer blog




http://blog.yammer.com/blog/

http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-social.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Feb13/02-28MessageTranslationPR.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Feb13/02-20YammerQ4PR.aspx

https://www.yammer.com/customers/

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-customer-stories-collaboration-software-reviews-FX103789449.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/jj573574


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721055(v=office.14).aspx

