Socializing with SharePoint My Sites

As the web has evolved over the last two decades, the way we think about information, authority, and business has changed completely. In the early phases, the idea of a graphical web pushed us to media-rich content. Next, we learned to aggregate content in directories. From there we pushed onto search engines and, eventually, intelligent search engines. But the biggest surge in recent years has been the social web.

We can see the prominence of the social web in major sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but we can also get a strong sense of how this "socializing" nature has spread to other technology. SharePoint is one great example, with its "My Sites" profile settings.

Those who have been using SharePoint for some time likely know a lot about My Sites – including the fact that it used to be absolutely awful to use. Because of this history, some companies still evade the SharePoint social profile completely. However, in SharePoint 2007 and (more essentially) 2010, the interface became more intuitive and useful.

My Sites allows you to set up profiles that:

• Share your areas of expertise with others in your company.
• Allow management to see all individuals with experience/expertise in a given topic.
• Allow users to post notes to their own page, educating others on frequently asked questions.
• Call the attention of colleagues by tagging them in notes.
• Create/view a visual company directory that clearly illustrates hierarchy.
• And much more!

Be sure to stay tuned to the SharePoint Engine website, and subscribe to our newsletter if you haven't already, since our April newsletter content will be giving some great tips and tricks on this all-important topic.