We all know the 'my sites' principle of the current SharePoint version. Although it was a pretty cool idea and customers were really interested in this, there were a lot of key things missing to make it a real social networking feature.
Microsoft really listened to the customers, developers, ... and did a great job in improving this part of the software. Enterprises know that a lot of knowledge is stored in the minds of its employees. The problem is that this knowledge is not always shared and that people often don't even know they have knowledge that is needed by someone else in the company. There is a term for this. It's called 'Tacit Knowledge'.
The new my site features will try to solve these problems. I must say that the demo's I have seen were great. By the way, the speakers use the same beta software coming out this month so everything you read here will also be available in that beta version.
I will now give a quick and high level oversight of what to expect for the 'my sites':
* 'Add as colleague' feature
* Overview of 'My Colleagues' with a possibility to search
* You can edit a colleague (personal notes or tags), you can group them ad apply your personal taxonomy.
* Via the "My Network" you have access to your contacts, your profile and settings.
* Everybody has a status update and you can update this any time of the day just like in Facebook.
* Everybody has a note board where people can write comments on your 'my site' also just like in Facebook
* "Recent activities"
The 'my sites' are really well branded, you have a horizontal tabbed view to get access to all this information.
Out of the box there is now anonymous access to the my sites but you can always access the feeds.
* Microsoft has put a lot of time in improving the way people can find someone with a certain expertise. You can now fill in a 'Ask me about' field which auto suggests keywords coming from the system
* You can also configure which parts of your site are visible to which group
* Your site will also include your presence information, a photo and a contact card
* You have suggested keywords linked to the business taxonomy which can be defined centrally in the system
* You can tag, rate and as said before, all information can be made available via a feed.
* The idea behind rating is that information that is well rated by the users, must be relevant and important information.
* There is a organization browser to browse your peers and managers. This is created using SilverLight and looked really cool!
* There is a central picture library and the picture picker is customizable and replaceable.
* You can do a lot of different search stuff: search for colleagues, do wild card search (finally), all the possible tags are on the left in a tree, phonetic name searching (worked very well and is language dependent), nickname search.
* The system can even mine colleagues and keywords from your sent e-mails.
* There is a search click through behavior which takes you from one search results all the way down to the information you really wanted. Relevance is playing an important role here.
* Blogs allow rich content.
* In the wiki's you can insert web parts right into your rich content, you can see the recently modified pages and you can use rich media.
* The Enterprise wiki supports wiki syntax, but not the complete wiki standard. It's fully based on publishing pages, it makes use of master pages, css and themes. There is a skinnable SilverLight video player and the video itself can be on the server drive itself or externally hosted.
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