What is social data anyway? Asking that question to Google returns a lot of pages telling us what we can do with social data, not what it actually is. On http://socialdatastrategies.com/2011/what-is-social-data/, you can find a definition. If you redefine the search to “social media”, you’ll find more, including an interesting paper by iCrossing:http://www.icrossing.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads/eBooks/What_is_Social_Media_iCrossing_ebook.pdf, The paper is a few years old, but I thinks it’s still a good read.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us much about social data in SharePoint so I’ll take the liberty of defining something myself.
Social data in SharePoint is largely information added to authored information already in SharePoint: pages, list items, documents, user profiles. Social data is largely non-authoritative and it’s purpose is to add value by users who do not necessarily have authoring rights. Social data adds a layer of (corporate) crowd knowledge and intelligence on top of managed information. However, social data is also information about a user profile (like LinkedIn) and unmanaged shared knowledge.
SharePoint offers the following types of social data:
- tagging
- rating
- commenting
- blogging
- profile events or updates
- contributions to discussions and wiki’s
- On a page in a note board or tag cloud
- On an item (document, list item, page)
- In a newsfeed on the user’s profile page (showing activities of the user)
- In the My Newsfeed page in the my site host (showing activities the user is subscribed to)
- As a blog post
- As a contribution to a wiki
- As an entry in discussion forums (based on the discussion list template)
Social data with tagging is also a way of discovering how people within your organisation look at content: a formal taxonomy enforces a corporate content classification, a “folksonomy” (using tags users can use freely) exposes how people really classify content.
Important: rating, tagging and notes are SharePoint 2010 Server features! A User Profile service application is required to enable them.
Note: For this article, I’ll focus on social data that appears in the newsfeed. This does not include discussion forums and wiki’s.
Creating social data
Social data is created on various locations:
Tagging an item
A user can tag an item with a keyword. The item can be a page, a document or any list item. Tags are actually keywords; these keywords are stored in the Taxonomy Term Store in a managed metadata service application.
Tagging can be done at various locations in SharePoint. When you open an OOTB site, for example, you’ll notice the two large buttons:
The “I Like It” button is just a shortcut for adding a tag with that name. If you click on the Tags&Notes button, you’ll get a dialog with options to add tags and notes:
A tag can be made private by checking the “Private” checkbox:
The result of the tagging is displayed in the newsfeed:
Tags can also be shown in a tag cloud web part:
This web part can be configured to show tags for the current user, for all users or all users for the current URL.
A nice additional feature is the tag community page. This is a generic page in the My Site host (tagprofile.aspx) that takes a tag (=term) ID as parameter and shows information about and actions related to the tag:
You can’t really do collaboration stuff here but leaving a note. Unlike Twitter, to leave a note for this tag, you have to go to the tag page itself instead of hash tagging your note. I bet this is going to be improved in vNext.
Tagging like this does not show up in search results either. You can add a Managed Metadata field to a content type or list and use the same term set as the tagging feature to add keywords to an item that will show up in search. However, these will not show up in the newsfeed.
Useful links:
- Social tagging overview (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608137.aspx)
- Video: Use tags and notes to share information with colleagues (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/video-use-tags-and-notes-to-share-information-with-colleagues-VA102465712.aspx)
In the Tags&Notes dialog, you can also add a note in the “Note Board”. Existing notes are displayed under the entry box:
The Note Board can be added as a web part to a page as well:
Note: The Note Board is not dynamic like your favorite Twitter client and will only show new notes from other users after a page refresh. You can’t respond to a note as you’d do in a discussion list: all notes are in a flat view.
To add a tag or note on a list item, you need to check the checkbox in the list view, which enables the “I Like It” and “Tags & Notes” buttons. Clicking these buttons opens the Tags_Notes dialog.
Notes are just plain text, so no (hash) tagging is possible. Notes are not indexed either so you can’t search for them. Building a search solution to search for notes containing a particular hash tag won’t work.
Useful links:
- Video: Use tags and notes to share information with colleagues (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/video-use-tags-and-notes-to-share-information-with-colleagues-VA102465712.aspx)
Users can show their appreciation of content by rating it. Rating can be done on any list item (which includes pages and documents) but only when the rating feature is enabled.
Important: the rating feature cannot be activated from the UI. You’ll need PowerShell to activate it.
Rating is not enabled by default in a list or library so you’ll need to enable it via the list/library settings:
Enabling rating adds two columns:
- Rating (0-5): the average rating value. This is displayed in a special field with stars. Under water, it’s a number value.
- Number of Ratings: does exactly what it says
Once available, a user can rate the item:
Mouseover the stars and click one of them.
Important: when a user rates an item, this action is not picked up immediately for other users. There is a timer job, scheduled hourly by default, that will calculate the average rating. You’ll notice a difference in the color of the stars: with blue stars an average has been calculated, with yellow stars this has not yet been done. When a user refreshes a page after rating an item on the page, this rating will not be visible before the timer job has run!
Useful links:
- Enable users to rate content (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/enable-users-to-rate-content-HA101791797.aspx?CTT=3)
- Turn on Ratings Feature in SharePoint 2010 (http://kroondyk.blogspot.com/2010/06/turn-on-ratings-feature-in-sharepoint.html)
- Managing privacy (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee620541.aspx)
- Using the New SharePoint 2010 Ratings Feature in Search (http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2009/10/28/using-the-new-sharepoint-2010-ratings-feature-in-search.aspx)
Blog posts created on your My Site are also social data in the newsfeed:
Why is a blog post social? Well, it how it’s used. A blog as a medium isn’t social per se: it’s just a mechanism to publish information, just like a news page is. The way we broadcast doesn’t necessarily make something social. However, most blog post show all the characteristics I like in the before mentioned paper by iCrossing:
- it encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is
interested. - it’s open to feedback and participation. Voting, comments and the sharing of information is encouraged.
- it’s seen as a two-way conversation.
- it’s community based (like this blog post is for the SharePoint community).
When you’re on your My Site, there’s a shortcut to adding new blog posts:
The blog is a sub site of the My Site.
Useful links:
- Plan for My Sites (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262500.aspx)
Although user profile information is part of the social data realm, it is not really created like the categories above but is generated from updates to a profile or (automatic) events based on profile information.
When a user changes a profile property, this change is picked up and published to people who follow the user (see “Following colleagues” below for what that means in a SharePoint context) and have subscribed to a particular change category (like “Sharing Interests”).
The update is shown in the newsfeed:
Not only an active profile change ends up as an activity, also changing memberships, upcoming anniversaries or manager change generate an entry in the newsfeed.
A new feature in SharePoint 2010 is the status message, although under water it’s just a profile field called “Status message” (SPS-StatusNotes) that you cannot edit otherwise (not even from the user profile service application). The status message can be edited by yourself on the My Profile page:
The newsfeed and subscribing to activities
The newsfeed is somewhat similar to the Facebook wall but actually more similar to the LinkedIn “All updates”. It shows various types of activities, by you or by your colleagues. The newsfeed is available in two flavours:
- Showing the activities from the colleagues you follow. The web part for this (What’s New) is on your My Newsfeed page (which is the default page of the My Site host)
- Showing your activities. The web part for this (Recent Activities) is on the first tab of your profile page.
You need to add a user as colleague to follow his or her activities. This can be done from the “My colleagues” pages in the My Site host:
Users that report to the same manager as you, are automatically added as your colleague, but this list can be edited manually. The button “View Suggestions” brings up suggested colleagues, like people who have tagged with your interest:
Once you have colleagues, you can follow their activities as set in the Newsfeed section of your profile. The following activities are available:
- Note Board post
- Tagging with my interests
- Rating
- Status Message
- Manager change
- New blog post
- New membership
- Sharing Interests
- Tagging by my colleague
- Upcoming birthday
- Birthday
- Upcoming workplace anniversary
- Workplace anniversary
- New colleague
- Job title change
- Profile update
What the newsfeed is not
What you’ll soon discover about the newsfeed, is that it’s not Facebook or Twitter:
- You cannot “Like” an activity or write a comment on it. In SharePoint 2010, you like or comment content, not anactivity
- You cannot hash tag your notes. Well, you can put a hash sign in, but there’s no mechanism to pick it up. So that also means you don’t have notes in your newsfeed that contain words that match your interests.
- It’s all but real time. New activities are picked up by a timer job running every hour (default setting), the newsfeed web part does not refresh without a page reload. You can set the jobs to run every minute, but that’s still far from real time.
- You cannot “follow” any other entity than a colleague, so if you want to follow activities on a community site, you have to visit that site.
A square peg in a round hole?
Does SharePoint 2010 social functionality make sense? Well, that depends on your needs. You might be just happy with a corporate LinkedIn, centered around user profiles.
If you’re searching for hash tagging, liking or leaving comments on activities and want social data centered around a community instead of a profile, SharePoint out-of-the-box will not satisfy your needs.
However, please appreciate that SharePoint takes security into account: you won’t see anything you don’t have access rights too. In the corporate world, securing content is often best practice but this comes with a price: if you want to build a knowledge platform using social media, preventing people from seeing activities is also keeping knowledge away from them. Just think of the case where your colleague tags something in a team site you don’t have access to. Should you still see the activity in your newsfeed?
So aren’t we asking too much of the platform? Full security and governance on one hand, full openness on the other. Structured data, retention policies and document management on on hand (a closed system), unstructured tagging, rating and comments on the other (an open system).
I don’t claim to have an exact answer to the paradox above as it’ll depend on the customer’s case. As long as you’re aware of the possibilities and consequences, you can provide the best solution. Hopefully, this blog post helps a little with that.
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