SharePoint 2013\2010 – Social Networking Capabilities Complete Tutorial

SharePoint 2013 has Introduced new Social Capabilities and I am here introducing some of the cool features and main areas where you can use them. I recently attended Toronto Business User Group Meeting where they have highlighted some of the benefits of Social Capabilities introduced in SharePoint 2013.

Main Features Introduced - Microsoft in SharePoint 2013 Introduced new Social capabilities for better collaboration in the company. New Features added are –

• Community Site
• MY Sites
• Newsfeed
• Follow people
• Follow Sites

Community Sites -

SharePoint 2010 has discussions list in sites to facilitate discussions. SharePoint Server 2013 continue to provide this Discussion list, but also expand on the discussion concept by introducing two new site templates named Community Site and Community Portal.

How to create a new Community Site - In the site Content of a site click on “new Subsite” towards the bottom. Next select the Community site template and then click OK. We are trying to create a discussion board here.

Features & Benefits –

* Replacement to Discussion boards - Community Sites are a Replacement to Discussion boards.

* Community Tools – Tools for managing this site, like you were presented in Discussion boards and blog posts.

In Community Tools you can –
Manage discussions –
Create categories
Assign badges to members
Reputation settings
Community settings

* Reputation model – Besides creating discussions you can create a employee or user reputation model based on hisher’s participation in community social activities. By this I mean you can assign badges (Achievement levels) to users and give them points for the activities (Member achievements point system) that user performs for example creating Posts, Replying to discussions etc. All these options are set by Admin of the site using “Reputation settings” A quick screen will give you an idea.

* Like & Rely - User’s can Like and Reply on discussions.

My Sites and NewsFeed -

My sites in SharePoint 2013 is like a Facebook page of your own. It has newsFeed pages you like (not really) I mean documents and people you follow.. you can view their activities and also tag and Mention people etc.. so all in one Facebooks @Mention feature and twitter’s tag feature.

Where is My Site – Click on NewsFeed at the Top and it will switch you to your MySite. (I am using Office 365 Preview)

Features & Benefits –

* NewsFeed - The home page of your My site displays feed that contains updates from you and people you follow. NewsFeed gets a lot from Twitter and Facebook. #Tags and Reply to a message from Twitter and @Mentions and Likes from Facebook. In the NewsFeed you can
Delete – Delete the entire conversation (depends on permissions you have)
Follow up – Follow the conversation. This will add a Task to your “Tasks” list in left Nav.
Copy link to conversation – As name suggests Copy link to conversation.
Lock Conversation -This locks up the conversation. Of course you can unlock it again.

* Status Update Shared with specific people – At the Top of your NewsFeed you can see a “conversation box” just like Facebook to post an update and select the group or people to share it with.

* My Tasks – My Tasks are user’s personal tasks. You can create news Tasks for yourself or add Conversations to this list as your Tasks. As earlier said Follow up for a conversation adds a New Task in My Tasks. My Task is like your Facebook Timeline .. no kidding it actually says timeline (see the screen below where i Followed up a conversation that shows in my My Tasks, accessing properties of this task tells me to remove it from my Timeline..)

* I’m following - A block towards right on your My site tells document, people, sites and Tags you follow. Each of the category under I’m following takes you to it’s respective page where you can manage what you follow. We will talk about just one that is Documents.
When you click on number for Documents it takes you to “Docs I’m following” page. Here you see two things on the left

* My Documents – This view shows all the documents that you have created or modified.
* Followed Documents – all documents that you are following.

Now that you have followed stuff and started conversations you might to manage how you get notified of the changes to the documents or mentions in conversions and Feeds.. Well there is NewsFeed Settings to rescue. See the below feature to get to the NewsFeed Settings.

* About Me or User Profile – On the left of My Site or NewsFeed you see “About me”. When you click on the page all it really tells is “How to edit User profile” and shows your recent activities.

To edit your Profile click on edit Profile (of course..)

Here you can add Basic Information,Contact Information and other professional details ..

NewsFeed properties and Other Profile details - in edit profile next to Details

From NewsFeed settings you can set preferences for

• Email Notifications
• People I follow
• Activities I want to share
• In continuation with the earlier post on Community sites and My Sites in this post we will see how to follow sites, documents and people. In SharePoint 2013 you can follow sites, documents, people that shows up on your My site under I’m following.You can manage the notification settings for your followed documents using NewsFeed settings as described in the earlier post. In this post however we will explore how you can Follow\Unfollow documents, People and sites and how to access them.
  Please note that Follow in SharePoint 2013 does not replace the conventional alerts functionality. Both exists in the new SharePoint version.
  
  How to Follow Sites - On the top right just below your user login name you would see a star and a Follow. This is for following this site.
  
  Following a site means not getting updates about site rather it’s just for an easy access a shortcut kind of from your My Site.
  How to unfollow site - Once in My site when you click on Sites that you follow under “I’m following” you would see “Sites you’re following”.
  
  click on star next to the site to unfollow it.
  
  
  Follow Documents - To follow documents click on “…” and under preview click on “FOLLOW”
  
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