By now, you've probably heard of SharePoint and are aware that it's a great fit for most organizations' document management and collaboration needs. While it comes with its share of shortfalls, it can also provide you with a starting point for social computing. Here are eight ways you can extend SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities to meet your social computing vision.
1. SharePoint My Sites
SharePoint's My Sites functionality encourages interaction among employees and offers a basic corporate equivalent to a Facebook profile. My Sites let employees learn about each other’s interests and expertise. However, My Site can also be pretty underwhelming and stale for the avid Facebook user. To make it a viable social computing tool, organizations should consider extending them past their out-of-the-box limitations. Consider installing third party products like nGage by OI Software. nGage gives My Sites a real WOW factor such as a visual “reputation," scoring user contribution using criteria such as their openness, creativity, and contribution level.
2. SharePoint Team Sites
Team Sites provide a centralized collaboration tool to manage teams and projects and include tools such as document libraries, lists, group calendars, tasks, contacts, and announcements. It is possible to extend this functionality with products like Kiiro collaboration software. This extends the basic SharePoint team site to allow Twitter-like status notes by team members giving instant updates as well as an impressive “Who’s on What” type of dashboard.
3. SharePoint Blogs
Blogs can be a top source for up to date expertise from subject matter experts. User-generated content often provides in-depth knowledge garnered from individual interests and subject matter experts. Harnessing this knowledge within the organization can provide wealth from untapped resources. Within SharePoint, every My Site includes a blog. Individual blogs, as well as blogs associated with Team Sites, can be archived and indexed for searching, becoming a resource for collective organizational knowledge.
As internal blogs become more successful, you’ll quickly outgrow SharePoint’s standard functionality. With a little technical help during implementation, leverage Community Kit 2.0 available for free on CodePlex. Extend SharePoint’s basic blog with Tag Clouds, friendly URLs, multiple categories for postings, and even comment spam detection if you want to implement this on your public-facing website.
4. SharePoint People Search
Another key desire for many organizations is to easily locate users within the organization by searching their profiles for specific keywords. NewsGator can extend search past the keywords and find experts your coworkers have scored as the most knowledgeable. Extend SharePoint’s people search to display these traits in the results, enhancing SharePoint with a very efficient way to track down the top experts for any challenge.
5. SharePoint Wikis
Enterprise wikis created within SharePoint are an excellent alternative to share knowledge, allowing others to edit and contribute through a simple interface. SharePoint wikis incorporate all of the features of SharePoint to secure and control the content: permissions, version history, document check-out and in, and approval workflows. Again, we recommend the Community Kit for SharePoint. Add custom page templates, tools for importing content from other wikis, and a web part that shows pages ranked by hits/popularity. It’s easy and free.
6. SharePoint Community Sites
SharePoint gives you the ability to create community sites b and invite or give access to users. SharePoint security groups control access to the content in the community. Blogs, discussion groups, and Wikis can easily be added and monitored using basic SharePoint functionality. NewsGator offers a powerful tool to quickly create and facilitate community sites around new ideas and innovation inside a company’s SharePoint Portal. Encourage quick and lightweight conversation with features like MicroBlogs. Automatically populate community sites with content related to their community site topics. NewsGator is also already boasting how they extend SharePoint 2010 features and seem well ahead of the pack on the R&D side with their product development team.
7. SharePoint Announcements of New Employees
If a SharePoint Portal is in place, adding new employees and posting an announcement to your landing page is quick and easy. Asking everyone to complete their My Site profile on their first day also allows information to
be instantly available to coworkers and more fully integrate them into the organization right away.
Add key data to new employee announcements using products like AASoftech’s OrgChart Webpart. This web part integrates directly with SharePoint and adds a great resource for an HR department to add further detail to a new employee announcement. Instantly update your company’s org chart and announce how they fit in by just adding the new employees to Active Directory.
8. SharePoint Social Computing Outside Your Network
SharePoint Groups are an efficient way to control user access to all your SharePoint content. As security models go, SharePoint is a pretty effective security structure for controlling how your Social Media features are viewed and used inside your network. But what if you want to involve your customers, partners, or vendors?
Trying to design and maintain an efficient security strategy can be overwhelming when planning for a large number of external users and groups. If you’re looking to extend your social computing strategy to include customers, partners, and vendors, Awareness Social Media Marketing Software offers you tools for handling security as well as extending your strategy to include users outside your organization.