How to Get the Most Value from Social Computing for
1 How to Get the Most Value from Social Computing for Business with Microsoft Author: Alina Fu Published: June 2008 2 The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This White Paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. © 2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, SQL Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Server, and Active Directory are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. 3 Table of Contents Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................... 4 Who Should Read this Paper? ................................................................................................. 5 Social Computing Overview ......................................................................................................... 5 Why Enterprises Adopt Social Computing ................................................................................... 6 Value of Social Computing to Enterprises ................................................................................ 6 Benefits of Social Computing to IT ....................................................................................... 7 Usage Scenarios of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies .................................................................... 7 Personal Sites ....................................................................................................................... 8 People Profiles ...................................................................................................................... 8 People Search ...................................................................................................................... 9 Discussion Forums ............................................................................................................... 9 Wikis ..................................................................................................................................... 9 Blogs ................................................................................................................................... 10 Really Simple Syndication (RSS) ....................................................................................... 10 Real-Time Communication (Instant Messaging) ................................................................ 10 Mashup Solutions ............................................................................................................... 11 Podcasting .......................................................................................................................... 11 How Social Computing with SharePoint Solves Business Problems ........................................ 11 Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as Social Computing Platforms .............................................................................................................. 12 Real World Applications of Social Computing .................................................................... 13 Miami-Dade County School District ................................................................................ 13 Accenture ........................................................................................................................ 14 My Sites .............................................................................................................................. 15 People Profiles .................................................................................................................... 18 Team Sites .......................................................................................................................... 21 People and Expertise Search ............................................................................................. 21 Social Networking Web Parts ............................................................................................. 23 Discussion Forums ............................................................................................................. 23 Wikis ................................................................................................................................... 25 Blogs ................................................................................................................................... 26 Really Simple Syndication (RSS) ....................................................................................... 27 Tight Integration with Real-Time Presence Communication .............................................. 28 Mashup Solutions ............................................................................................................... 28 Podcasting .......................................................................................................................... 30 Microsoft’s Main Differentiators .............................................................................................. 31 Integrated Social Computing Tools on a Single Platform ................................................... 32 Consistent User Experience in a Rich Development Environment .................................... 32 Faster Time to Market at a Lower Cost with Security and Governance Control ................ 33 IT Benefits .............................................................................................................................. 34 Stable Base Platforms ........................................................................................................ 34 Ease of Management .......................................................................................................... 34 Scalability ............................................................................................................................ 35 Multiple Portal Options ........................................................................................................ 35 Ease of Customization ........................................................................................................ 35 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 36 4 Executive Summary Social computing is a term with many meanings. We refer to social computing as the natural evolution of collaboration, a shift of focus from content to a focus on people. The power of social computing lies with the users and the communities. Organizations obtain business value from the experiences and ideas produced through the use of these collaboration technologies that are modeled after natural social behavior. The common term for such technologies is Web 2.0. For Web 2.0 technologies that apply to the enterprise setting, the derived connotation is Enterprise Web 2.0, or, for short, Enterprise 2.0. These technologies help facilitate social interaction and enable valuable information to be gathered, analyzed, and shared broadly. More specifically, these technologies provide users with the ability to: Establish a richer identity that extends beyond their HR information. Create content and collaborate seamlessly with colleagues both inside and outside the immediate organization. Find subject matter experts and form social networks with colleagues. Develop, amend, and publish static and dynamic content easily. Search for resources based on social distance or relevance. Social computing has proved immensely successful over the last few years for consumers on the Internet. Sites such as Facebook have taken the development of peer groups beyond demographic and geographical boundaries, and community solutions such as Wikipedia have created a collaborative encyclopedia which is often referenced as a major resource for information. The adoption of social computing by the business world has been slower, often because of concerns over security and privacy. However, social computing has certainly gained traction and adoption among enterprises over the last year. In order for social computing to be successful in the business context, the technologies must align well to a user's normal working patterns. For instance, similar to the way people network at a social event, where we move from one conversation to another or introduce new friends into a social group, these technologies help us keep abreast of what our colleagues are doing and facilitate introductions, but on the Web. For a number of organizations, Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, the collective name for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, address their security and management concerns. With these applications, Microsoft has integrated social computing technologies within an enterprise ready platform. SharePoint Products and Technologies are built on well established server technologies, including Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition to this, SharePoint Products and Technologies leverage the capabilities of the world's most popular productivity suite, Microsoft Office. This paper provides examples of the how enterprises are using social computing to address business problems. Customers referenced include Accenture and Miami-Dade County Public Schools. While very different in organizational structure and goals, both of these customers implemented Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to harness the community development and information sharing possibilities of social computing. 5 Who Should Read this Paper? This paper provides information on the technologies that enable social computing for business and uses customer examples to reference how these capabilities are applied using SharePoint Products and Technologies. This information is relevant to business and technical decision makers who are considering or planning to implement social computing products in their organization. The paper will answer questions about the business value of social computing, the benefits of the SharePoint Products and Technologies platforms, why customers are deploying social computing, and how they are using it to address their business problems. Social Computing Overview Why should you care about social computing? Growing numbers of business users are already enjoying the benefits of social computing on the Internet: sharing information, keeping up with acquaintances, and expanding their social networks. This evolution of data-centric to user-centric computing is based on the advent of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Social computing uses technology modeled on social behavior and conventions. In the Internet space this is typified by sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia. These sites use Web 2.0 technologies, including people profiles, wikis, blogs, XML feeds such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Internet messaging (IM), social bookmarking, discussion forums, mashups, and podcasting. The uptake of these community solutions started with consumers on the Internet who were interested in joining social groups or communities to create an online persona, exchange information, and to meet new people. Many of the popular social computing environments on the Internet enable users to develop personal sites, provide information, interact on the Web, and work collaboratively. Examples of these four broad definitions include: Provision of personal sites—Facebook and MySpace provide social interaction sites, where users can develop groups of friends or common interest communities, while there are professionally focused social networking sites, such as LinkedIn. The key point is users decide on what information to provide and whom they want to share the content with. They also decide on how they want the layout of their personal sites. Information provision—There are many ways to disseminate information. Podcasting is a form of social media to share audio or video content. Sites like YouTube enable subscribers to upload their favorite video files or homemade clips for other Internet users to view, rate, and comment upon. Blogs also provide thought leaders with a new communication channel to broadcast information that is available to a broad range of users. Real-time communication—There are a number of Instant Messaging (IM) providers, such as MSN Live Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, that enable users to establish a network of friends or associates with whom they can communicate in real-time, using text, video, and audio transmission technologies. Central to this is the ability to see which of their friends or colleagues are online at any given time and to communicate with multiple people simultaneously. Collaborative working—On the Internet, users can come together across geographic boundaries and collaborate on a single source of content. Wikipedia has become one of the most popular encyclopedic resources in a remarkably short time. Wiki technology enables registered users to participate in the dynamic information capture. It uses an author and approval process, by which 6 moderators ensure content accuracy and relevance. The information on Wikipedia is available to all Internet users to read and the content is contributed by the community. For technology-savvy people, social computing has become the preeminent means of socializing and communication. Many users of Facebook and MySpace check their profiles daily for messages and to peruse other members’ profiles in the community. Two key reasons for the success of such solutions are their simple user interfaces and the users’ enthusiasm to share personal information and meet other members. These groups are based on shared interests or common goals and span geographic and demographic constraints. Enjoying the community aspect of social computing, employees are bringing these technologies into the workplace. However, they are using the consumer version of social computing which may not have the security standards or business relevance that are appropriate for work. While organizations have initially frowned upon the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace, regarding them as distractions from work, many have now realized how these technologies, when modified to be applicable for enterprises, can provide visible business benefits. Organizations are deploying social computing within their firewalls in the form of intranets and extranets to enhance business communication and collaboration. Other organizations are using social computing in their Internet portals for their business. Enterprise social computing environments provide the benefits of collaboration and team building, while maintaining organizational security and data privacy. Successful results from organizations that deployed social computing environments show how these technology implementations thrive in the business. Why Enterprises Adopt Social Computing Even before the term “social computing” was coined, managers recognized and experienced firsthand an aspect of social computing in the workplace, such as the water cooler. The water cooler is often depicted as an informal gathering place in a company; a place to meet and converse with colleagues casually. However it has several significant limitations: It is geographically and temporally static. If valuable information is exchanged, there is no method of capturing it. Little is known about the source of information, so the information may be unqualified for distribution. Traditionally, the information swapped at the water cooler has been lost or only partially remembered. With the Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as discussion forums, blogs, or wikis, the information can be captured and archived. Even more impromptu conversations can be saved, perhaps with an Internet Message (IM) saved to a document or on a blog. The information has a verifiable source and can quickly be corroborated by discussion with other online associates, preferably subject experts. Also, with virtual social networking, users can create affinity groups with others across a company, or even with partners and customers outside the firewall. Social computing via software tools is a phenomenon, but the way social computing works is intuitive, so the inclination for users to embrace it is natural. Value of Social Computing to Enterprises There are several ways in which social computing can offer business benefits. For example, the technologies enable users to collaborate on projects or business 7 opportunities irrespective of physical or time separation. According to a survey by US CIO Confidence Poll Online Survey conducted December 2006, the top three reasons why enterprises embrace social computing are to: Improve the efficiency and productivity of the business. Encourage creativity and set the organization apart as an innovator. Address a gap with the capture and management of knowledge. These responses are common among 106 CIOs at firms using at least one of six Web 2.0 technologies. IDC estimates that information workers spend 9% of their day searching for information (IDC: The Hidden Costs of Information Work, March 2005). Much of this research time is affected by the lack of sources that capture the proper data. Improved information and knowledge management systems helps to save time and minimize redundant inquiries. It is sometimes difficult to establish an exact ROI number for social computing, because it is difficult to put a price on collaborating effectively, finding the right people easily and quickly, and pushing relevant information to the appropriate audience. Different organizations may place different values on the same functionality. The most important value of social computing are the benefits the users receive from contributing, reading, and having access to information and resources made available from Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Benefits of Social Computing to IT The benefits of social computing for IT departments should not be regarded as separate from any business benefits—IT is as much part of the business as any other department. The key IT benefit of introducing social computing to the end users is that IT can provide the right tools for end users to solve business problems. Having these technologies available in the enterprise can differentiate IT as an innovative and resourceful department, with insight on what is needed to help the end users be more productive. IT is more than just a cost center; IT departments want to bring the right technologies to improve business processes. The IT department is able to directly benefit from the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies as well. For instance, IT can leverage wiki technology to create a FAQ for call centers. IT customer service representatives are able to quickly locate responses to commonly asked enquiries as well as refine the standard responses on the FAQ wiki when necessary. IT leaders may also use RSS feeds to push information out and enable audience targeting to distribute different announcements that are relevant to respective product support groups. Of course, IT is also concerned with supporting the infrastructure, so it is important that the social computing solutions will integrate smoothly into the current business environment. IT departments recognize that vendor solutions that offer governance and control are “enterprise ready”. Thus, they will be more likely to implement and deploy such environments more quickly and seamlessly. Usage Scenarios of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies The usage scenarios most applicable for social computing vary between enterprises. Perhaps the appropriate scenarios are most easily understood by identifying the opportunities for collaboration in your organization. Social computing can be used for almost every task in the workplace. It is at the discretion of the organization to leverage which technologies will provide them with the most business value. 8 Common business problems our customers want to address with social computing include the ability to: Drive collaboration and social interaction across geographic and organizational boundaries Transfer tacit knowledge into information and knowledge management solutions Enhance discoverability of resources through new ways of communication Capture the “wisdom of the masses” by gathering social feedback Establish a sense of belonging and connection to the company However, since enterprises vary in function and objectives, it is useful to categorize the core uses for the main Enterprise 2.0 technologies used to drive social computing. Personal Sites Personal sites are Web pages where users can publish their own information. This is possible for many sites, but in a personal site, the user has complete control over what the site content. A personal site can be thought of as the next-generation personal file share. It can serve as a document sharing space, idea exchange forum, or simply an extension of their people profile. The personal site is a container for profiles as well as other information. A personal site is owned by the individual user. The users can control who has access to their information and what content feeds show up on their private view. This allows the site content to stay relevant and personalized to the specific user’s interests and information. . People Profiles People profiles enable users to publish personal information about themselves and their work within the company firewall or on a public facing site, dependent on the security architecture. With traditional profiles, the majority of the content in the profiles are populated by the individuals. The users are able to decide what type of information about themselves they want to share with their community. Users are able to specify their own interests, skills, or responsibilities and add personal touches such as a list of hobbies to blend professional and personal details as desired. Not only do the profiles provide a rich source of information, but the data on the profiles can be leveraged in other pages outside of the personal site. For example, content on the people profiles can show up on a search result to help users search for appropriate contacts or subject matter experts based on the properties presented. Team leads can also run searches to find users based on keywords from their profiles to develop special interest groups or communities. In today’s profile trends, such as on the Facebook profiles, content may not always have to be manually added by the user. Activity trackers make users’ profile changes more discoverable via a news feed tool or other individuals may tag the user without the user’s initial consent. This shows the progression of the profiles towards a more community centric model and less pressure for users to update their status regularly. It is necessary to underline the importance of personal sites and people profiles. Without the information that these contain, much of the interaction that is the cornerstone of social computing cannot occur. If no one lists their skills and expertise, how can one leverage people search to locate subject matter experts? Personal sites and people profiles can also serve as a pivot point for other users to discover related blogs and wikis, technologies that enable individuals to publish their thoughts or capture dynamic information. 9 People Search Introducing people who share common interests is one of the key usages of people search. Consumer community sites such as Facebook leverage this with their search facility. For businesses, directory services, such as Microsoft Active Directory, provide basic information, such as name, title, and office location, but the ability to make a search for detailed subject matter expertise is beyond the scope of the data available. For instance, you may be looking for a sales account executive with expertise in a given product. It is unlikely that a single product will appear in their job title so you have to start looking for broader categories, probably sending speculative e-mails to try to find the right person. Often this is done through an existing social network—"I know Barbara in sales and she may know someone who…"—and a series of similar e-mails may unearth the right source. Finding the right people to connect with during a specific search will become more difficult as an organization expands. To illustrate, users interested in forming virtual teams representing five departments with the company on a project need to find representatives with the appropriate skills to create the team. By leveraging the people search capability, the team leader will be able to make a more informed decision and connect with the people who share common interests or knowledge necessary to ensure the project’s success. The effectiveness and power of people search should encourage people to actively update their profile information to improve the accuracy of the search results. For more sophisticated solutions, the search facility can search for common points between users and the profiles they visit to highlight points of introduction. The ability of a search engine to maintain and index pertinent information helps end users find and connect with the right people more quickly and more successfully. Discussion Forums Discussion forums provide an area where people can post ideas and opinions on a range of different topics. In the consumer space, discussion forums are places for users to discuss issues, offer product recommendations, or ask questions that the community can help with. In recent years, the forums have evolved to include more topics for collaborative review or debate for pretty much any subject. In the enterprise space, companies have leveraged discussion forums to enable staff, partners, and customers to hold an online dialogue on business issues. The forums may be informal or formal, moderated or real-time, depending on the goals of the forum provider. They are a great resource for users to check if their questions have been asked and answered already, and they can serve as a sounding board for an idea feedback. Discussion forums may be thought of as a group chat environment where the content in each thread remains static, but the discussion is dynamically changing. Wikis Wikis provide a collaborative environment where any number of users can add to a body of knowledge to create content. Furthermore, most wikis store dynamic content, which means that it is common for contributors to refine the information over time or add new sections without changing the existing format structure. Wikis enable mass collaborative authoring and knowledge capture. To illustrate, in an organization with a changing workforce, employees can document best practices on wikis to ease the transition and training for new hire staff, and then modify content over time as the process gets refined. While this may seem similar to a shared folder document, a wiki can help eliminate the confusion that comes from multiple copies uploaded by different contributors or uncertainty about which is the latest version. Furthermore, because the content of a wiki 10 can be structured as a series of concept-specific web pages, rather than as a large monolithic document it is more straightforward to use hyperlinks between topics to build an interconnected web of knowledge. Wikis can be searched and traversed in a more targeted fashion than is possible with documents. With advanced solutions, you can tailor wiki permissions as appropriate to control who can edit and who can view only. This option is useful in specific instances, such as the wiki for the Mergers & Acquisitions team or the wiki the Legal department uses to collaborate on confidential cases. Ultimately, wikis streamline content creation in one collaborative workspace, making knowledge capture and management simpler and more efficient. Blogs Blogs enable individual users or groups to create content that is available for others to comment upon or add to, but not amend. These have been compared to persistent conversations, where a user can see what was originally written and then review subsequent review comments. Blog authors, also known as bloggers, can post a new entry or modify their previous entry, but a majority of blogs contain static content. Popular uses of blogs include sharing personal or work related content through the expression of opinions, ideas, or factual information. Bloggers can tailor their tone between informal or formal depending on the type of content in the entries. Blogs can also expand on previous exchanges made on communications such as telephone calls or instant messages. This enables both parties to broadcast their thoughts to a wider audience. Many companies who deploy the blog technology widely throughout their organization find contributors and viewers use blogs as a communication tool for broadcasting information, sharing ideas, and reporting to interested communities. At a more strategic level, an executive blog offers a unique opportunity for executives to communicate their thought leadership within an organization and to invite feedback from the employees. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) RSS makes it possible for users to specify content or topics that are of interest to them through subscribing to the RSS feed. As changes or additions to information sources are posted, the RSS feed is updated to notify the subscriber. This is an integral part of social computing, because, just as it happens in a social network, people pass on news rather than requiring interested individuals to ask for updates repeatedly. RSS feeds can be regarded as a company newsfeed that can be pre-programmed to be delivered to target audiences. Enterprises that use RSS generally have announcements they want to share from top down to the rest of the company, or different branches or departments have news they want to share internally that is relevant only to their function. More effective than sending email to a wide range of people under multiple aliases, RSS subscriptions allow end users to access the feeds when it is convenient. Real-Time Communication (Instant Messaging) Not all conversations need a telephone call or an e-mail to send the same message efficiently. The use of IM enables users to see who is online and available and then start a relatively unobtrusive conversation. A ringing phone is difficult to ignore and can becoming distracting, but it is easy to leave an IM open until it is convenient to respond. Saved IM messages also provide an accurately detailed account of the conversation. Rather than having to take notes or call back for clarification of a point, the message itself becomes a record. Another benefit of IM is its ability to transfer files between participants, which combines the immediacy of a verbal conversation with the flexibility of an e-mail in a single environment. 11 Mashup Solutions A mashup is an application created by combining multiple sources of data and visualizations. In the context of an enterprise, a mashup is an application that results when a business user combines multiple sources of enterprise and public data with some visualization and interaction capabilities. Usually, mashed data is layered on top of some graphical view to provide context, for example, using a map. Mashups are an important tool because business users face many situations where the tools they are provided at work fall short in solving specific business problems. These adhoc business problems require ad-hoc applications or solutions, many of which cannot be addressed by IT organizations due to a lack of resources and personnel. Enterprise mashups serve to empower these business users to solve some business problems quickly and on their own. In addition, mashups complement existing data integration solutions by also providing access to data not commonly associated with data integration or business intelligence, such as data accessible via RSS, Representational state transfer (REST), or web services, which can be combined with internal, enterprise business intelligence. Finally, mashups provide visualization and interaction capabilities that are superior to standard reporting in tabular or graphical format. Mashups help business users combine the deeper insights they have obtained with interesting visualizations to provide context to that information. Enterprise mashups enable business users to render internal business intelligence on externally available visualizations such as maps from Microsoft Live Search Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth. By combining internal and external sources of information, a business user is able to obtain even deeper insights. Podcasting Audio or video podcasting has always been popular among consumers and is now making its way into the enterprise. The IDC acknowledges “the ways in which social networking has embraced the use of video and also how video sites have taken on more social networking capabilities.” (IDC's Breakfast Briefing at CES 2008, January 7, 2008) The attractiveness of user generated content and the style of its presentation create an additional layer of curiosity among the community. Podcasting can offer content in a more engaging manner and enables users to provide feedback, make recommendations, and rate the content. These capabilities help form instant communities based on the topics of the podcasts and encourage social networking among its members. Early adopters of podcasting in the enterprises include education institutions and various departments across vertical industries. Professors in major universities create podcasts of their lectures for students to download and review outside the classroom, helping students capture better notes and review the content. Vertical industries use podcasts as another channel for distributing training content. Some have found this to be an effective tool especially for sales training because the sales representatives spend most of their time traveling and need a mobile version of a blog or wiki to learn about new products or sales strategies. With podcasts, employees are able to better visualize through audio or video what lessons are being taught and make them more successful. How Social Computing with SharePoint Solves Business Problems Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provide the essential technologies in an enterprise environment. These Enterprise2.0 tools can be used individually or together to leverage the usage benefits from social computing. 12 We have explained how and why enterprises are embracing social computing. Now we will delve into the specific Enterprise 2.0 technologies on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform that enterprises use to satisfy their business needs. An issue that is critical and needs to be addressed before any technology deployment is identifying what are the business problems. In the case of social computing, decision makers need to ask themselves questions to understand the importance of social computing for their organization such as: What business benefits will our users accrue from social computing? Can social computing provide solutions to meet our employees’ requirements? Do we see a need for increased collaboration between users? Do we want to provide an integrated social computing platform for users? Do we currently, or will we in the future, need to adopt social computing features to address the changing workforce? Will social computing help our business grow and innovate faster and better? What will be the impact for our existing desktop, server, and security infrastructure? What is the management overhead of supporting social computing? The answers to these may be unique to organizations, and there may be some additional research necessary to determine how your staff will react to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. If your conclusion is that social computing will have value and positive impact on your business model, then SharePoint Products and Technologies offer a compelling solution. Let’s look at the key Enterprise 2.0 technologies for social computing that are offered within Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as Social Computing Platforms Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 offer a number of social computing technologies, as shown in this table. Feature Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Discussion Forums X X Wikis X X Blogs X X Really Simple Syndication (RSS) X X Tight Integration with Real-Time Presence Communication X X Web Part Framework X X 13 My Sites X People Profiles X People and Expertise Search X Social Networking Web Parts for My Sites X These are the core tools available for social computing environments. After sharing some real world applications, these are discussed in greater detail. Real World Applications of Social Computing Accenture and Miami-Dade County Public Schools are pioneering the use of social computing within their organizations. Their experiences appear in this paper, but here is some background on their deployments. Miami-Dade County School District Miami-Dade County School District is the 4th largest public school district in the United States. Their students in the classrooms were already experienced with social networking; many had MySpace and Facebook accounts so implementing social computing was a natural fit for them. They would serve as the early adopters of the technologies and provide incentives for the teachers to use them as well. Because the schools are responsible for their students, Miami-Dade School District wanted to implement a secure social networking space that was hosted inside their firewall and which implemented vital capabilities such as permission controls and content management. The schools created social networks for students to befriend other students within their district. If students wanted to invite someone from outside their district to view their profile, approval was required. This policy helped ensure the safety and privacy of the students. The implementation was followed by a 3 month trial of a lightweight version of the full Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal, branded as PortalLite. This trial proved popular with the users—especially with the pupils who used social computing tools outside of school—and was considered robust from a support and management perspective for the district’s IT department. Miami-Dade School District deployed their full social computing infrastructure in August 2007. They built their environment on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to deliver a secure and controlled social computing environment to their staff, pupils, and even parents spanning over 375 schools and nearly 400 administrative offices. The goals of their deployment included: A single sign-on for services. Improved collaborative working across administrative and teaching environments. Reduced dependency on e-mail, Fax, and postal services. A more dynamic and creative learning and working experience for users. The choice to implement Office SharePoint Server 2007 was made based on business requirements and in-house experience. The IT department recognized that Office SharePoint Server 2007 could deliver: 14 Security—Miami-Dade School District identified that Office SharePoint Server 2007 would enable them to deliver social computing quickly and, most importantly for an organization dealing with young people, securely because it integrated with their Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure. Scalability—The student and staff population would require up to 500,000 personal profiles, using the My Sites. Office SharePoint Server 2007 can support up to one million sites on their centralized infrastructure. Dollar value—Office SharePoint Server 2007 offered excellent value per personal site deployment compared to other solutions they evaluated. Speed of implementation—The infrastructure deployment took less than three months and the full solution deployment was completed in six months. In addition to this, after the initial pilot, the switch over from PortalLite to the full portal was a seamless experience for the end users. Ease of management—The use of Office SharePoint Server 2007 built on the existing in-house experience of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory. After the deployment 3 to 4 people can manage the entire environment. The social computing environment includes personal sites, discussion forums, and blogs. With 360,000 My Sites for students and over 50,000 My Sites for employees deployed, the uptake of the social computing environment has been even better than they had hoped. There was no mandatory rule for the staff to fill out their profiles, but at least 50% of the employees have set up their profiles. For the staff, the Employee portal now holds many of the standard HR facilities, such as sickness forms and leave entitlement information that were previously unavailable online. As for promoting collaboration between students and teachers, in the Student portal, students are able to view their schedule and grades, access electronic textbooks, and store documents. Most importantly, students and staff have a collaboration site to deliver homework and supporting resources. For example, if a student has left a book at school, they can get the assignment from the portal and use the electronic textbook to complete the homework. There are also blogs and discussion forums available for students and teachers to communicate about projects outside of the classroom. In addition to benefits for the teachers and the students, the parents can be kept updated on their child’s progress, curriculum, and lessons. The Parent portal has increased the amount of communication between parents and faculty, allowing parents to contact the teachers and access their child’s information outside of the school hours at their convenience. The wealth of information has allowed the staff, pupils, and parents to use the resources 24 hours a day, making communication more flexible for everyone. Besides these three portals, Miami-Dade County School District also created the Community portal on the Internet. This was to help the external community members receive and share information. Currently, businesses are offering student internships on the Community portal for the students to apply to. Using the workflow capability, the businesses are able to follow up with the students who have applied to the job postings and meet the eligibility requirements. The technologies in all of these portals were adopted without formal training, because the user environment was designed after collaboration with staff and pupils, who identified what they wanted and how it should look. Accenture As a knowledge-capital intensive organization, Accenture readily recognized the potential of social computing and were early to adopt Office SharePoint Server 2007 as their 15 delivery vehicle. The overall goal was to enable Accenture employees to leverage the knowledge, experience, and skills of others working in the company, in the most effective and efficient manner, by using technologies that would naturally encourage collaboration. Central to this was the ability to identify expert resources, so that a customer would not just benefit from working with a single technology expert but from capitalizing on the expertise of 175,000 Accenture employees. Their social networking solution was personalized to the company, branded as Accenture People. To achieve this, Accenture focused on the use of personal profiles and blogs. These enabled users to not only publish business information and their real world experience, but also to use the Office SharePoint Server 2007 People Search capability to discover one another across a global enterprise. This feature can search personal profiles and deliver skills matches based on social distance—how close you are to an expert via mutual colleagues—and relevance. In one reported example, a search for a subject matter expert using the traditional speculative e-mail broadcast took two days to return an effective answer. The same query using People Search delivered the same expert in 15 minutes, and without broadcasting unnecessary e-mails across the company. In addition to the improved expertise location, personal profiles provide increased employee information, as individual users share their new project experience and skills. Because the profiles and blogs are created and updated by fellow Accenture employees, the significance of their content is more relevant for the audience than a random external blog or social network. Unlike Miami-Dade, Accenture adopted a soft launch for their roll-out, experiencing viral growth versus a big bang rollout. This approach allowed the tool to develop virally, with no enforced usage. Additional factors contributing to its success include a memo sent to all employees from the COO about the importance and the support of social computing at the executive level of management, introduction to the profiles during new hire orientations, and a launch video that was published on the intranet home page coinciding with the deployment. Within Accenture, social computing benefits quickly reached a critical mass where users regard Accenture People, the company’s My Sites profiles and blogs as an intrinsic part of their working environment. The design and deployment of Accenture People took six months, with the company making use of its in-house development expertise to customize the available components to more exactly fit their requirements, and developing unique solutions that fulfill their specific business needs. My Sites As described earlier, personal sites allow users to shape their virtual identity. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, personal sites are branded as My Sites. A My Site is composed of two views, each with its own template: Public view— This view is visible to any authenticated and authorized user within the network. There is a default layout template that comes with this view. It consists of a people profile component and can store shared documents, links, membership list, and blog entries. People profiles are explained in more detail in the next section. Private view— This personal view can serve as a space to store personal documents or receive subscription feeds to personalized content. It can also help manage social networks and improve collaboration with colleagues. The private view is accessibly only to the individual to whom it refers to. 16 The Office SharePoint Server 2007 My Site “We are building a sense of provides each user with a personal space where community across Accenture that they can save and share personal information creates a common corporate and documents, as well as a public profile page culture across environments and to create their identity and share documents with generations. The result is people other users. My Sites have been around since feel a sense of belonging via the SharePoint Portal Server 2003, but has been social computing tools. We believe gaining traction since the surge of interest in Accenture People is a fundamental social networking. In Office SharePoint Server component of this.” 2007, there are enhanced social networking Christopher T. Miller features that can be added to My Site profiles or Senior Director, Product other Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites. My Management, Accenture Sites goes far beyond providing a simple Web site for sharing HTML pages or centrally held documents. My Sites can contain Web parts, RSS feeds to internal or external content, personal blogs that are publicly available within the network, page links to wikis, a list of all document libraries and associated tasks assigned to the individual, and much more. The mixture of these components enhances information discovery for visitors to the profile page and facilitates social interaction from the sharing of common interests or feedback on the content for the profiled user. For instance, the easy access and visibility of blog entries on the My Site profile encourages profile viewers to write comments or suggestions related to the posting. This type of feedback channel invites a broader audience to share their opinions and allows the author to receive perspectives outside of their social network. Another example is that visitors to someone else’s My Site public profile may discover distribution lists or sites that they were unaware of but relevant to their role. By discovering this information on a public profile, the visitors gain an additional resource that may increase their productivity. My Sites is without question one of the core features of social computing with Office SharePoint Server 2007. It is very effective for building teams and helping employees feel the sense of community within their organization. Accenture People is built upon the Office SharePoint Server 2007 My Sites capability. Each employee was provided with a My Site profile, which included both the public and private views, and a personal blog. The profiles, which made up the social networking solution, were rolled out to help increase the connection between employees. This was especially beneficial for employees working across geographies. As an innovative company, Accenture adopted social computing because it realized the benefits far outweigh the perceived risks. As the company attracts top talent, many of whom are early in their career, Accenture wanted to establish a sense of belonging and connection for the new hires. Also, the company recognized the inherent uptake and productivity improvements social computing offered from this “new way of work”. In the private view, users are able to customize their My Site by adding web parts that would be useful to them. Popular Web Parts include the RSS Viewer, Colleague Tracker, SharePoint Sites, Recent Blog Posts, and Outlook Web Access Web Parts for My Calendar and My Inbox. Users can treat the private view as a “launch pad” to start their work day - by keeping up with current events and industry news, viewing their colleagues’ changes in responsibilities and projects, responding to feedback left on their blog postsall within a single view. Since the Web Parts are self-selected by the user, the information is as relevant and useful as the user has set it to include. Miami-Dade deployed My Site profiles to create social networks for staff and students. Figure 1 is an example of a student’s private My Site that shows the child’s shared photos. On the left navigation, the student is able to access and update and use profile, document, discussion, and other content. 17 Figure 1. Miami-Dade Student My Site Private View Because organizations have unique business models, there is room for modifying the templates. Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform offers this flexibility with customization options. This is useful for My Sites, where end users may want a personalized look but do not have the technical expertise to create their own layout template. In this case, the IT administrator can set a standard master page template for all the profiles. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides users with the tools to tailor their My Sites and provides many options of Web Parts out of the box. In addition, their IT departments can also create Web Parts and allow users to add these to their profiles. Users can also determine how much profile information they want to share and with who they want to share it with. In addition to the use cases from Accenture and Miami-Dade, a user’s My Site offers a rich environment for sharing ideas, uploading documents and understanding each other’s interests and skills. By maintaining the information on the profiles and keeping them up to date, the My Site profiles are a valuable resource for a number of scenarios, including: Team meeting preparation—Provides personal information for other team members, such as memberships, affiliations. 18 Community building—Provides information for establishing communities of practice or common interest groups. Project team development—Provides information for expert identification via People and Expertise Search. Problem resolution—Identification of subject matter experts and use of expert blogs and publications. Office SharePoint Server 2007 recognizes that end users will want to use My Sites for different scenarios and has provided free templates in the form of Application Templates and Role-Based My Sites. More information about the 40 application templates and 7 role-based My Sites can be found on the Office Online official website, http://office.microsoft.com My Sites are available by default, and can be configured by the site administrator through a simple option selection in the administration menus. Once enabled, the creation of a My Site only requires the user to click the My Site link, which appears on the top right corner of the screen. Even users who do not normally have site creation permissions can create their own My Site. Within the profile space, a user can create subsites and add pages and documents as they would for any other Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. People Profiles People profiles are built on the base template offered with Office SharePoint Server 2007, as shown in figure 2. This information can be filled in manually by the user or it can be populated from databases, such as Active Directory, an LDAP server, or other business systems that can export profile information via the Business Data Catalog. 19 Figure 2. My Profile Edit Details Screen 20 Accenture has added property fields to the Details portion of the standard public My Site template for its employees to include additional data that is useful and relevant for their practice, as you can see in Figure 3. Figure 3. Accenture People Public Profile 21 In the public view of the My Site page, there are default personal information elements about the user, such as job title, department, and office location. Internally, Microsoft uses My Sites with these fields populated by Active Directory. The other fields shown from Figure 2 are optional and up to the discretion of the user to include as much information as they want. The profiles are more professionally targeted with fields such as skills, current projects, and past projects, but there are also social elements such as the fields for hobbies and birthday. The profiles are a way for users to extend their identity and connect with other users because this information can be reused elsewhere. In addition, organizations can modify and add custom properties to tailor the profiles to be more specific and pertinent to their industry. Furthermore, users can set different levels of permission settings separately for the property fields to provide enhanced security and privacy on the information they share. Users who maintain their profiles help improve the success of the people search results. As part of Office SharePoint Server, the profile details from the My Sites are most commonly leveraged in the search results for the People and Expertise Search functionality, which will be described later. Team Sites While Team Sites are not commonly included in broad discussion on social computing, they are pertinent when reviewing the social computing tools available in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Team Site template enables a project manager, or any other authorized user, to provide a site for teams to create, organize, and share information quickly and easily. It includes a document library and Web Parts that render lists such as announcements, calendar, member contacts, and quick links. It can, of course, be extended to provide additional facilities, such as team wikis, picture libraries, or even surveys. Project or team sites are a central resource for the staff. While My Sites focus on individuals to help them become more productive and publish the content they have created; team sites are spaces which encourage group collaboration and communication. The team can access information on individual or multiple sites, and project managers or site owners can manage permission access to sensitive project or team information. This means that with the security options in Office SharePoint Server 2007, information to which a user does not have access does not appear in the search results, so the user is not aware of its existence. People and Expertise Search It is important to be able to find the right people in your organization. Often this can mean exploring job titles or departments, where success is a function of good guesswork, “Accenture is a knowledge capitalrather than structured searching. Office intensive organization with SharePoint Server 2007 uses the public user employees dispersed across the profile information gathered from the My globe. The concept of social Sites Profile page to conduct people networking is very powerful, and searches. With the People Search feature, enables us to tap into the users are able to locate subject matter knowledge of all our employees experts for the searched term. Results are such that our clients “hire one and returned with the searched keyword given in get 175,000.” These technologies enable us to tag and identify context of the profile and are by default, experts in ways that were sorted by social distance. This means that previously impossible.” the results at the top of the list have a closer Christopher T. Miller, Accenture degree of separation in the social network to the user who is making the query. The 22 results can also be sorted by relevance as in any standard search tool. To further help users narrow their search results, the search functionality enables people to be filtered by categories such as job title or department. Customers are able to customize this to add filters that are pertinent to their search needs. Office SharePoint Server 2007 indexes the content of user profiles, enabling users to search public profile information, such as skills, responsibilities or memberships. Figure 4 shows the results page that Accenture People users receive when they use their People Search. The information returned to the search is based on the data provided on the users’ My Sites. Employees are able to use the People Search functionality to help staff consultants for projects, allow employees to ask others for help on similar projects or experience with the customer’s industry, and locate subject matter experts within the organization. Accenture has found in some cases the level of details on the My Site profiles has increased as use of search has grown, because users can see the benefits offered by this capability. Figure 4. Accenture People Search Result Page People and expertise search are a major driving force for improving knowledge management for many enterprises. One immediate benefit is that users can approach a subject matter expert via a social connection or based on implicit recommendations, rather than through an arbitrary request for help. While this may seem like a subtle difference, some people prefer to receive help from someone they have some degree of connection to more than they do from a complete stranger because there may be some inherent amount of trust in the individual to provide accurate information. Also, some people tend to respond sooner to inquiries from acquaintances than a request from someone with whom they have no connection. This is a reflection of natural social behavior, which serves as the basis for social computing technology models. 23 Social Networking Web Parts Office SharePoint Server 2007 has new collaborative Web Parts out-of-the-box for the My Sites that have emphasis on the social networking functionality. These new Web Parts include the following: Colleagues Web Part—This Web Part displays a compiled list of Colleagues that can be categorized. There are five ways that a user can get new colleagues: o The user adds them manually. o Office SharePoint Server 2007 finds implicit colleagues from Active Directory. This would include a user’s manager, peers, and direct reports listed in the database. o Colleagues may be imported from Instant Messenger. The list comes from user’s contacts and will suggest internal contacts. o Office SharePoint Server 2007 can mine Office Outlook to identify new colleagues. There is an algorithm that looks at the user’s Sent items box to suggest colleagues. o Office SharePoint Server 2007 can also suggest colleagues based on common group memberships, such as e-mail distribution lists and Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites. Colleague Tracker Web Part—This shows colleagues and their recent changes to their My Site’s profile details, anniversaries, blogs, documents, memberships, and out of office status messages. In Common With Web Part—This displays colleagues or memberships you have in common with the profiled user’s My Site. For example, memberships in common with will show e-mail distribution lists or Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites you share between you and the user’s My Site you are browsing. People Search Web Part—This enables you to search for a person based on the keyword. People will show up as results rather than content. People Search Core Results Web Part— The search mines My Site profiles and returns a list of people sorted by social distance by default. For each person, the searched keyword is displayed to show the context of where it was found, as well as a couple of key profile attributes. In addition, the user can switch to the standard results view by relevance. The site administrator can define required profile attributes, to maintain consistency across an organization. Organization Hierarchy Web Part—This shows manager, peers (others who report to the same manager) and direct reports. Discussion Forums The conception of an idea often starts from a discussion, but what tool can be used to capture this ongoing dialogue? Discussion forums can be enabled to recreate the experience of a dialogue that is archived and can be viewed in a threaded format. This enables an easier documentation process as well, if needed. A discussion forum also enables users to post questions or request information from any other networked user, thus broadening the audience base to receive assistance from. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a discussion list where users can create new discussion topics and respond to existing ones in a threaded format. This demonstrates how social computing enables users from across an organization to work together on a problem, consuming and sharing ideas at their convenience. The structure of the threads can be followed naturally, as if reading the transcript from a conversation. Discussion forums can be set 24 up as part of a central business forum, or users can create their own forums within their My Site as well. Accenture has established discussion forums to collect end-user feedback for several internal applications. The application development teams monitor the discussion to understand what improvements and enhancements they would like to see. This public platform helps users know that they aren’t the only one having trouble and provides a strong tool for sponsors and development on which to focus their priorities. Miami-Dade set up discussion forums for students and teachers to collaborate and communicate over projects and questions. Students can access the pages for each class, which are Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites. In each class page, there are discussion forums for each class subject. Students can post questions outside of classroom hours and teachers can monitor the students' progress. The questions and answers are captured so other students with similar issues can refer to the response at a later time. This enables cleaner project and class organization for students and the teachers alike, allowing students to post questions and receive help as they work on assignments and the teachers to better manage and track their class’ progress. Discussion forums are also available to Miami-Dade employees as shown in Figure 5, so that co-workers can track and maintain an ongoing online discussion on important topics. Figure 5. Miami-Dade discussion forum 25 Wikis Wikis are a popular tool for most enterprises, especially for mass collaborative authoring and documenting knowledge. Well suited to modern working environments where enterprise users may work in virtual teams with limited face-to-face interaction, wikis in Office SharePoint Server 2007 allow multiple users to access the content simultaneously. Depending on the workflow defined, if one is defined at all, the edits to a wiki are reflected to all participants—contributors and readers. The types of applications that lend themselves to wikis are usually based on the creation of a coordinated solution to a complex question, where various team members need to provide input. Until the arrival of the wiki concept, document review usually came via a protracted e-mail thread, with an attached document for review and amendments. However, the amendment process consisted of sending around the versions to everyone involved in the process, then resending after each person made his or her edits. By the time the document is published for final consumption by the target audience, the authors and reviewers have reviewed multiple versions of the document, some with minimal changes between each version. This is inevitably a slow process in which the final version may not be completely accurate, because information may be lost, confusion may arise over changes that were not tracked, or a contributor may be left off a copy list. This may mean even more time is required to resolve the issues. With SharePoint Products and Technologies, a wiki can be made available to all users on a site, but different individuals may have different levels of access to the content, such as read only versus edit and approval permission. SharePoint Products and Technologies provide wikis in a secure and manageable environment. Key management usage and features include: Site Templates—SharePoint Products and Technologies provides a wizard driven template for wiki creation. This eases the work of both site administrators and users. Wiki pages can be part of My Sites or any Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. Authoring workflow—the authoring and approval workflow in SharePoint Products and Technologies enables a subscriber to check out a page or document from the server, make amendments, and then submit the content for approval. This means that incorrect or inappropriate information cannot be placed online without the approval of an editorial authority. While more informal wiki sites may not require such policing, it is a useful option for business or corporate sites that want to exert this level of publishing control. Version management—A user can make changes to a Web page but the system maintains a version history. For every entry, users can see when and who made the changes. Also, a changed document can be reverted to an earlier version. WYSIWYG editor—All editable pages in SharePoint Products and Technologies can be amended using a Web browser based editor, rather than requiring the use of an HTML editing application. The editor provides standard document editing tools, such as bold and italic, font management, and cut and paste. In addition to this the new user also has dialog boxes to help with options such as inserting links or graphics. For more experienced users, there is an HTML source editor included. All wikis provide read access by default out of the box for all authenticated users. Users who created the wiki, of course, have full access control. Figures 6 and 7 show the extent of control users have to configure settings and modify permission levels. Users can even fine tune action limitations to members who have access to the wiki. This feature of 26 enhanced security and control options on content is another additional benefit from using the Office SharePoint Server 2007 social computing functionality. Figure 6. Wiki Edit Permissions Page Figure 7. Wiki Customization Page Blogs While the SharePoint Products and Technologies wikis provide collaborative capabilities for a single document instance, blogs provide a fast and simple means of sharing thoughts and opinions in the form of personal publishing for static content. Blogs can consist of separate documents or pages in the form of comments. This means that each user's comment is distinct but clearly related to a common topic. Blogs also offer groups or individuals the ability to keep journals. The term blog is based on the original idea of a Web log. Blogs, which began as Internet diaries, have now become one of the most active forms of communication on the Web. At Microsoft, several executives and product teams publish their ideas, thoughts and announcements through blogs. Organizations may also create product blogs as a means of creating and informing the community, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog. The community members may provide expert 27 information via guest blog entries that may be used as resource material by others tracking related interests. Every My Site profile comes with a personal blog for the user. By default, the Office SharePoint Server 2007 blog entries can be categorized as work related, personal, or other. In the case of “other”, blog authors can specify a category for the post. This helps separate the entries into more specific topics, producing more targeted search results and improved audience targeting. Accenture employees create their own blogs about news on their role or projects or latest work travels. Figure 8 shows a great example of an employee blog. Figure 8. Accenture Blog SharePoint Products and Technologies blogs share the rich editing and security features of wikis. As highlighted in the above image, another option for authoring blog posts is to use a blog posting program such as Office Word 2007. The integration of Office Word 2007 as the blog posting editor allows authors to leverage the features from the ribbon and graphics, such as SmartArt, creating a rich blog entry. Users may also use tools outside of those provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007, such as Windows Live Writer, to insert images, videos, maps, tags, formatted text, and other formatting. With Windows Live Writer, you can also work offline on your blog entry and set it to autopublish when you come back online to your Office SharePoint Server 2007 blog. For more information about Windows Live Writer, please check: http://writer.live.com Creating an Office SharePoint Server 2007 wiki or blog is fairly simple. There is a site template available for a wiki or a blog when the user creates a new Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. These technologies are also available in the current version of Windows SharePoint Server 3.0. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Another important element of collaborative communication is to keep interested users informed of changes or amendments to documents or pages. The RSS Viewer Web Part enables users to consume published RSS feeds, such as news wires or internal URL feeds to a coworker’s blog or wiki page. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also provides the Content Query Web Part, which can publish RSS feeds to other users. This facility integrates the use of social computing forums, such as wikis and blogs, into the user's normal working practices, by using a 28 push mechanism for information updates, rather than by necessitating the user to regularly check for changes. Tight Integration with Real-Time Presence Communication There is presence awareness integrated and enabled throughout Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Office Communications Server. This enables users to see who is online by showing a presence status indicator next to user names on any Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. If the individual is online, a user can click the presence status indicator to send an instant message. The presence status indicator is integrated with Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft MSN Messenger to provide information. The presence status indicator also provides several options and details, such as sending an email, scheduling a meeting, or information about the offline user’s office location. If the end users are voice enabled, they are able to make and receive calls via the Office Communicator client or start a video conference with only a couple of clicks. Customers acknowledge the valuable benefits from the tight integration Office SharePoint Server 2007 has with Office Communications Server 2007. For instance, when employees browse the My Site profiles for a people and expertise search, find the person they want to connect with, the presence status indicator allows them to decide quickly whether to call, email, or instant message the subject matter expert. Mashup Solutions Mashups represent an extension of Microsoft’s original vision of productivity and empowerment for business users that Microsoft Office and Office SharePoint Server 2007 have delivered to enterprises of all industries and sizes. For example, an Excel user can connect a spreadsheet to multiple data sources. The user is then able to publish that spreadsheet to an Office SharePoint Server 2007 server for others to see and to collaborate on. Moreover, this spreadsheet can directly feed a list of Key Performance Indicators on an Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboard that can be personalized for the visitors of the site. In addition, users are able to create a page with this spreadsheet, KPIs, and other Web Parts such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds for a more complete experience. The Web Parts Framework forms the basis of SharePoint portals. Web Parts are the basic unit of functionality and user interface, and are mini-Web applications that can be configured by end users. SharePoint Products and Technologies ship with several Web Parts out of the box and provide a framework on which custom Web Parts can be developed. Business users can easily create dashboards and pages directly using the browser or using SharePoint Designer. For more information, please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/mashups Mashups bring a number of challenges to the Chief Information Officer. From security to management, we believe that these challenges need to be addressed proactively in order to fully deliver the value of mashups to end users and to ensure that enterprise data and assets are protected and governed. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the security and authorization mechanisms to address these challenges. In addition to these communications benefits, social computing also recognizes that there are disparate sources of information available for the end user to conduct their work. End user mashup tools, such as Microsoft Popfly, enable users to readily create mashups using multiple data sources. An example of how Popfly can be used to create enterprise mashups is as follows. Popfly can use customer addresses held in an Office SharePoint Server 2007 list with an RSS 29 feed, and project them on to a Web-based map source, as shown in Figures 9, 10, 11, and 12. The figures depict the following steps: Office SharePoint Server 2007 RSS Source List—a list of addresses on Office SharePoint Server 2007 is published as an RSS feed. Source List Integration with GeoNames and Virtual Earth—in the Popfly mashup creator the RSS feed is linked to GeoNames and Virtual Earth. RSS Source Output on Virtual Earth—the address information available from Office SharePoint Server 2007 is resolved through GeoNames to create a pushpin icon at the correct location on the Virtual Earth map. Output Integration in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Page—the mashup output can be embedded into an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site page by using the Content Editor Web part. Figure 9. Office SharePoint Server 2007 RSS Source List Figure 10. Source List Integration with GeoNames and Virtual Earth 30 Figure 11. RSS Source Output on Virtual Earth Figure 12. Output Integration in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Page For more information on how this mashup was created, please visit: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=881 Podcasting Internally at Microsoft, there is a podcasting solution that is analogous to YouTube for the enterprise. Academy Mobile is an internal Microsoft solution for social networking and podcasting built on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform. Users can discover audio and video podcasts relevant to their work. In addition, they can post audio or video podcasts to the site, or use Microsoft’s studio to produce them professionally. 31 Figure 13. Podcasting Kit for SharePoint Visitors to Academy Mobile can engage in a social community that includes commenting, rating, and sharing the best podcasts with the community. The platform is an extranet that can be accessed easily, without accessing the VPN, and lets users download content from anywhere and view it on your PC or mobile device (pocket PC, Smartphone, or Zune). Now on Codeplex, there’s the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS) that is a publicly available version of the Academy Mobile solution. The PKS (Figure 13) is currently available for free download. Please visit www.codeplex.com/PKS for additional information. Microsoft’s Main Differentiators In addition to the benefits offered by the SharePoint Products and Technologies features for social computing described, there are a range of technical management and development benefits for IT departments. Many of these benefits are based on the ease of implementation of Office SharePoint Products and Technologies and its administration, it’s flexible development options, the best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 technology partners and 3rd party vendors who offer social computing templates and add-ins, and, of course, the integration with a range of other Microsoft products and platforms. This paper only focuses on the social computing elements of these benefits, since there are a range of additional advantages that reach beyond this area. The three key differentiators are: 32 Integrated social computing tools on a single platform. Consistent user experience in a rich development environment. Faster time to market at a lower cost with security and governance control. Integrated Social Computing Tools on a Single Platform One of the most important strengths of Office SharePoint Server 2007 is that it provides customers with a single social computing platform. The platform is designed to integrate with other information sources, such as directories, Microsoft Active Directory or any LDAP V3 directory, and line of business applications, such as CRM or ERP systems. You can access the latter through the Business Data Catalog (BDC), which uses Web services or standard database interfaces. Centralization of business information access and provision of a single, easily customizable user interface are essential for efficient social computing. This integration by design and default means that you can capitalize on the business benefits offered by social computing and have them tightly coupled with your business data and business applications. “SharePoint’s social networking capabilities allow us to be able to drive down our infrastructure and operations costs. We can do this because we have a centralized and consistent platform. For example multiple applications link to Accenture’s People Profiles.” Christopher T. Miller, Accenture Office SharePoint Server 2007 recognizes that customers interested in social computing find value in having more than one tool. By offering extensible people profiles, social networking, blogs, wikis, content RSS feeds and e-mail alerts, static tags, discussion forums, and many more, customers are able to use pick and choose what technologies would best serve their different needs. With a platform that combines all these core social computing tools in an integrated solution offering, customers won’t have to deal with the added complexity and additional costs of trying to combine disparate solutions together with each other and with their current collaboration infrastructure. Furthermore, the transition between each of these technologies within an integrated solution provides a more seamless experience for the user. This helps greatly with minimizing user frustration and confusion. Moreover, with an integrated platform, Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers more than social computing on its platform. The power of the platform enables customers to leverage the capabilities from Unified Communications, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, Portals, and Collaboration workloads using the tools. In addition, SharePoint Products and Technologies are closely integrated with Microsoft Office 2007. Within the Office suite, end users can embed Outlook plug-ins into their Office SharePoint Server 2007 site, access and edit documents hosted on Office SharePoint Server 2007 Sites (which includes My Site profiles), and use the Office Word 2007 client to create blog entries. The growth of social computing within any enterprise organization does rely on tools users are familiar with to gain traction. Consistent User Experience in a Rich Development Environment Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a consistent user experience across the Enterprise 2.0 technologies when compared to integrating heterogeneous applications. This encourages users to explore the range of features within SharePoint Products and Technologies with the consistent navigation and look and feel. This helps to speed up the creation and adoption of business applications. Office SharePoint Server 2007 also integrates with common desktop applications, which means that the tools provide a more 33 seamless user experience while transitioning between technologies and thus, are easier to use. For technology savvy users who are perhaps already using Facebook and LinkedIn, it is easier to embrace similar types of consumer Web 2.0 technology made available in the workplace. For those who are less experienced with social computing, it is important that enterprises integrate the new tools with existing applications to maintain a consistent user experience that will encourage adoption. This will help minimize training time and costs as social computing becomes an extension to current collaboration practices. A rich development environment is available for solution extensibility. The development and customization options range from changing aspects of the out-of-the-box configuration to new development of features via in-house development, third party ISVs, or using the .Net development tools. In addition, there is a careful selection of ISV partners who are well recognized in the Enterprise 2.0 space. These partner solutions are integrated with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and offer extensions for their specialization areas. This flexibility – customizations, extensions, partner add-ons makes Office SharePoint Server 2007 a platform with multiple options to satisfy the varying customer needs. Furthermore, partners choose to develop on top of a rich application development environment to provide customers with the most cost-effective social computing solution. Faster Time to Market at a Lower Cost with Security and Governance Control Customers who choose SharePoint Products and Technologies for their social computing solution have witnessed firsthand the short time it took to set up the desired infrastructure and deploy social computing. Furthermore, Microsoft was ranked the highest for ability to execute compared to the other vendors, according to Gartner’s 2007 Team Collaboration and Social Software Magic Quadrant. SharePoint Products and Technologies have developed from earlier enterprise-ready collaboration and content management business applications from Microsoft. This means that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 are designed to adhere to IT governance requirements, as well as offering enhanced business productivity. For many organizations, a common obstacle for obtaining approval for social computing to be used is the fear of users misusing the tools in a way that will put the company in legal risk. To combat this perceived risk, the proponents of social computing argue that there is nothing preventing users from committing the same error today in a mass email or verbally in a public area. Moreover, social computing tools keep a complete record of which individuals contributed what and when, thus making it easier to control and resolve the issue. These hypothetical situations could happen today, but more often than not, they don’t because the users realize that their name and their reputation are attached to their content. Thus, organizations acknowledge that the value and business benefits of social computing outweigh the perceived risks. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides the ability to implement security and management across your content. While this control may not always be necessary, it is reassuring to know that it is available when you need it. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built to provide enterprise-ready management options for governance, such as records and digital management leveraged from the Enterprise Content Management workload. The powerful tools, such as permissions and access control, extend to Office SharePoint Server 2007 social computing capabilities, which provide a solid business platform for organizations that wish to implement social computing solutions. As mentioned earlier, all of the social computing tools are integrated with the rest of Office SharePoint Server 2007, thus delivering business productivity beyond social computing. This is a significant benefit as it can help lower the maintenance, 34 management, and integration costs for deploying a social computing environment that works well with collaboration and other workloads’ solutions that exist currently. IT Benefits While business benefits drive application development and user requirements, it is essential that your social computing solutions work for your IT department for a successful deployment. SharePoint Products and Technologies have a proven track record in stability, ease of management, scalability, multiple portal options, and ease of customization. This means that the social computing environments can be deployed quickly, with minimal downtime, and IT will feel comfortable about the governance and security options available. In addition, organizations with particular business problems can make customizations or use extended solutions to fulfill their needs. “SharePoint has come of age and enables us to get a good return on our investment. It integrates with a number of other collaboration and Microsoft technologies we are deploying, in particular, the unified communications platform. “From an operational perspective there are advantages: We can invest in a single set of skills and capabilities, have highly skilled and deep expertise in a single platform that drives economies of scale and multiple benefits.” Christopher T. Miller, Accenture Stable Base Platforms SharePoint Products and Technologies are built on well-establish Microsoft platforms, such as Windows Server and SQL Server. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is designed to take advantage of the scalability of these server environments, which means that it can extend to support an enterprise scale numbers of users and millions of documents or pages. SharePoint Products and Technologies integrate seamlessly with both Windows Server and SQL Server to provide cohesive administration and security. In Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, users are authenticated by Internet Information Services. You can use a variety of authentication methods to suit your requirements and your existing infrastructure. There are three base authentication methods that you can use, either singly or together: Windows integrated authentication, ASP.NET forms, and Web Single Sign-On. You can also choose to permit anonymous access alongside any authentication method. You can grant a limited permission set, typically read-only, to anonymous users. This is particularly useful for Internet deployments. Ease of Management You can administer Office SharePoint Server 2007 from the Central Administration Web page. This provides access to a rich management and configuration environment, which provides operations, application and Shared Service Provider access. From these pages you can enable and configure deployment and management functions for My Sites, user profiles, and RSS feeds. Central Administration manages solution properties at a farm level. You can also use individual site collection and site management pages to provide more granular usage profiles. The day-to-day management of functions such as backup and restore are provided within the core Office SharePoint Server 2007 product, which provides a configurable recycle option to save you time recovering documents deleted by mistake. The small refinements can provide major administrative benefits, minimizing support costs and maximizing user productivity. 35 “With our in house knowledge of Microsoft technologies, Active Directory, SQL, SharePoint Services, .Net the additional development cost was almost zero for the PortalLite implementation.” Debbie Karcher CIO Miami-Dade County Public Schools Scalability Scalability is a key feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007, as it is easy to deploy and extend across multiple server systems to enhance performance and capacity. You can separate services such as search and indexing, as well as implementing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in clustered or mirrored configurations. These were important capabilities for Miami Dade. They know that they can extend up to 1,000,000 users, so they are confident that this will provide a platform for the future. It is also essential that they have a secure environment. Multiple Portal Options SharePoint Products and Technologies are capable of deployment as intranet, extranet, or Internet portal solutions. For extranet portals, this flexibility means that it is possible to extend your social network to include people outside your immediate organization. This may include premier customers you maintain a close working relationship with, or partners and suppliers that need access to certain information that’s not publicly available. In any of the portal options, the security features are maintained through the different levels of permission settings, offered by Microsoft server platforms, such as Windows Server 2003 or Internet Security and “We feel that it gives us a lot of Acceleration Server 2006 (ISA). flexibility in the organization. We Accenture created an intranet solution are seeing a lot of opportunities to because it suited their goals of internal use SharePoint sites for some of information and resource collaboration. our outside initiatives. We may be However, this may, in time, be extended in using it for a program that involves part or wholly with selected customers. The teachers at Miami-Dade and flexibility offered by Office SharePoint Server teachers in Russia [dependent on 2007 means that the initial deployment does funding]; they are able to communicate via the portal and the not have to be a final decision. social network.” For Miami-Dade, they have enabled students Debbie Karcher and parents to interact with the teachers through extranet portals. In addition to this, local businesses can interact with the community via an Internet portal. Meanwhile, they store their employee’s personal information in an intranet portal. For each of the different scenarios, they have still maintained the security that was essential to a successful deployment. Ease of Customization Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a rich array of Web Parts that enable developers and non-developers to personalize their pages with content they want to see and share. For social computing environments, a popular personalization would be setting up the private page of the My Site. Any end user can pick and choose from a comprehensive list of Web Parts that are available out of the box. The information delivered via these Web Parts is content that is personalized to the user. For example, the Colleague Tracker Web Part would only deliver updates about the users’ Colleagues. Another example is that the My Calendar Web Part would synchronize with the user’s Outlook and show only 36 that particular user’s meetings. These are done through the use of wizard driven menus. If organizations wanted a uniform user interface, the IT staff can modify the page template and deliver the master layout template for all users to use. The use of preconfigured site templates or page layouts is convenient for organizations. The 40 Application Templates and 7 Role-Based My Sites were popular downloads because they offered a solid master template for common scenarios that IT could deploy. These templates provide a starting point for custom development and can speed up the deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007-based applications and solutions. A popular extension solution for social computing is the Community Kit for SharePoint 2.0 (CKS 2.0). This kit comprises of a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables users to enhance the social computing features available from the platform. For instance, organizations with MOSS can substitute the Enhance Blog Edition template for richer blog functionality. The CKS 2.0 is licensed with the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) which is an OSI approved Open Source License. As time progresses, more and more social computing focused solutions will be added to the kit. For more information on the Community Kit for SharePoint, please visit www.codeplex.com/cks The growth of SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments has also generated a wealth of 3rd party suppliers for support and development services. The Microsoft SharePoint Solutions Directory lists over 300 partners and suppliers. This represents an enormous set of resources for deployment, management, and development of SharePoint Products and Technologies. However, this does not mean that SharePoint Products and Technologies need external development or management support for customization. There are a range of development tools that are available directly to users, such as the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDKs which are available for download from Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). This site also provides a large amount of programmatic information to support your in-house development efforts. Conclusion Social computing in the enterprise is becoming an increasingly hot topic of discussion. Analysts encourage businesses to embrace social computing, and employees are making grass-roots efforts to make these technologies available and authorized for usage in the workplace. Despite the initial reaction of prohibition for using Enterprise 2.0 technologies, a growing number of organizations are recognizing the potential benefits of this evolution of collaboration. The consumer use of personal profiles to discuss favorite hobbies and movies has evolved to be a personal profile about job responsibilities and projects. Business specific social computing applications provide valuable benefits, such as the ability to locate experts, communicate and collaborate with colleagues across the continent, and enhance productivity of virtual teams in ways that were previously impossible. The questions about social computing have progressed from “What is it and why is it important?” to “How do we use and govern it appropriately?” Thus, it is wise to choose a solution that will help the business best harness and implement these technologies and applications. By convention, Enterprise 2.0 provides self-enablement for users. Because the power of social computing lies with the users, this characteristic of the tools make sense. Historically the IT pyramid has been a top down structure, with the IT department providing tools, managing data, and developing solutions that enabled users in the organization to work effectively. IT innovations have been user driven, but designed and implemented by IT department specialists. Enterprise 2.0 provides structure and 37 platforms, but allows flexible usage by the user base. A social network is not like any other application; users can drive the content and its use in whichever way seems most appropriate to their requirements. This moves the user from directed to volunteered participation; the quality of the content contributions may be improved because the contributors are enthusiastic and invested in the topic. Across a range of organizations, as demonstrated by Accenture and Miami-Dade, industry leaders are enabling their users to create valuable business solutions based on social computing on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform. Accenture’s social network, Accenture People, enables their employees to find and connect with experts within the Accenture community, thus providing better and more knowledgeable service to their customers. For them, social computing offered the most effective and efficient means of delivering the ideal of hiring one and getting 175,000 resources to their customer. For Miami-Dade, the use of social computing technologies provides an inclusive, exciting environment for their pupils and increased collaborative environment among students, parents, and the faculty. For the younger generations, adoption of social computing was expected, because the students grew up accustomed to having these tools in their daily lives. The students’ method of communicating online, using tools such as blogs, discussion forums, and social networks, is the way they are accustomed to for collaboration. By introducing the teachers to the way their students think about team work, Miami-Dade addressed the students’ needs and promoted better relationships between the students and the faculty. Social computing can change the dynamics of employee interaction because they enable enterprise staff to work in patterns that resemble natural social behaviors, and contribute to the collective intelligence of the organization. Enterprise 2.0 technologies also encourage users to develop communities of practice, based on common interests or goals. Both of these use cases help organizations make resources more easily discoverable and surface existing content, making information more transparent and available to their employees. The people profiles help improve users’ understanding of their colleagues’ role beyond their formal job title. The scenarios in which these and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies can enhance business performance through social computing are vast, but here are some popular usages. Social networks that can be leveraged include project staffing or mentorship connections. Blogs entries can serve as thought incubation channels for personal publishing. Wikis can be used as a project management tool for collaborative authoring. Any and all of these tools can help influence innovation and business growth, This requires a cultural change for Legal, HR, and IT departments, who are used to adding extra layers of privacy and security around content and providing solutions for specific business problems rather than offering toolkits and allowing the users to select which problem they want to solve and with what tool. However, for organizations to successfully embrace social computing, executives and these departments have to accept the evolution of collaboration technology and realize to achieve the performance goals for the business they will need to provide tools that leverage the collective intelligence of their employees. This does not mean that social computing solutions are easier to deploy and manage or less powerful than traditional IT solutions. The platform for a social computing implementation must be robust and flexible. With the different approaches of Enterprise 2.0 vendors available, organizations need to choose a solution that offers the social computing environment they envision and one that will integrate with their existing infrastructure. IT leaders must develop a thorough plan for what the social computing infrastructure will include, and ensure that the usage policies are acceptable to users and the business requirements. 38 Irrespective of how applications evolve in a social computing environment, the hardware and application platforms that deliver Enterprise 2.0 services will need a strong business case. Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers a valuable platform for social computing because of three key differentiators: Integrated social computing tools in one platform—In addition to the suite of social computing tools, users can leverage the functionality of the other 5 main Office SharePoint Server 2007 workloads, such as Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search. Consistent user experience in a rich development environment—As part of the integration within the platform, there is a seamless user experience when transitioning between the Enterprise 2.0 tools. In addition, Office SharePoint Server 2007 is designed for ease of customization and extensibility, so customers have various options to tailor their environments and select applications that best suit their needs. Faster time to market at a lower cost with security and governance control—This is important when deciding on the implementation and deployment of the social computing environment. Businesses need to still operate, so minimal downtime is preferred. Also, the technology has to integrate with the backend infrastructure while addressing the users’ need for privacy and security of their content. Office SharePoint Server 2007 functionality integrates with core technologies for security and data management, such as Active Directory and SQL Server. The development changes on the My Sites features from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to the new social computing functionalities of the My Sites and other tools in Office SharePoint Server 2007 shows Microsoft’s commitment to innovate. Microsoft continues its investment in Enterprise 2.0 applications. Overall, the increasing momentum of customer successes and deployments and Microsoft’s broadening social computing ecosystem demonstrate that social computing delivers valuable business benefits. Similar to the transition of e-mail into a core business tool, social computing technologies are on the path of becoming an integral part of your organization’s collaboration environment. It is essential that you select a suitable platform for your social computing needs today, and one that will be robust enough to keep develop on for the future, making the investment now worthwhile. To keep up-to-date with the developments in social computing from SharePoint Products and Technologies, including demos, case studies, partner solutions, and futures information, please visit the official social computing page at: http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/
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