Becky Bertram of Savvy Technical Solutions presents the new social features of SharePoint 2013, including the enhanced Newsfeed, Community Sites, Sky Drive Pro, and Yammer.

1. Social Features of
SharePoint 2013:
Enhancing Productivity
Becky Bertram
Owner, Savvy Technical Solutions
SharePoint MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)
www.savvytechnicalsolutions.com
http://blog.beckybertram.com
@beckybertram

2. Social
[soh-shuhl]
adjective
1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by
friendly companionship or relations
2. living or disposed to live in companionship with
others or in a community, rather than in isolation
[according to Dictionary.com]

3. What Comes to Mind?

4. Social Network
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of
social actors (such as individuals or organizations) and a
complex set of the dyadic ties between these actors. The
social network perspective provides a clear way of analyzing
the structure of whole social entities.
In the late 1800s, both Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies foreshadowed the
idea of social networks in their theories and research of social groups. Tönnies
argued that social groups can exist as personal and direct social ties that either link
individuals who share values and belief (Gemeinschaft, German, commonly
translated as "community") or impersonal, formal, and instrumental social links
(Gesellschaft, German, commonly translated as "society"). Durkheim gave a non-
individualistic explanation of social facts, arguing that social phenomena
arise when interacting individuals constitute a reality that
can no longer be accounted for in terms of the properties of
individual actors.
[Wikipedia]

5. Culture
ˈkəl-chər
noun
a : the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and
behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and
transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a
racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic
features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life}
shared by people in a place or time <popular culture>
<southern culture>
c : the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices
that characterizes an institution or organization <a corporate
culture focused on the bottom line>
[Merriam-Webster]

6. Corporate Culture
• When people in an organization can interact with
one another, as a community, a corporate culture
forms based on their interaction with each other on
a social level.
• Tools that allow people to interact with one
another can be used to positively or negatively
impact corporate culture.

7. Social Media
Social media is an online environment in which
content is
created, consumed, promoted, distributed, discovere
d or shared for purposes that are primarily related
to communities and social activities, rather than
functional, task-oriented objectives.
[Gartner]

8. What Does This Really Mean?

9. Task-Oriented Social Tools
• How can social interaction with one another be
centered around tasks?
• E-mail
• Instant Messaging
• Collaboration is a buzz-word for people working
together toward a certain goal. SharePoint is
commonly referred to as a collaboration tool.
• SharePoint provides tools for people to interactive
collectively and communally, but also individually
with one another, toward specific goals and ends.

10. Bottom Line
Becky’s 2 cents:
People can just as easily waste time using e-mail and
instant messaging or the telephone as they can using
social tools in a product like SharePoint.
Organizationally, rather than eliminating a tool that
can potentially help your employees because you
fear they will waste time, ensure that proper
expectations are set for levels of productivity, period.

11. Where We’ve Come From
• SharePoint 2007:
• My Sites
• People Search
• Profiles
• SharePoint 2010
• Feed
• Org chart
• Colleagues

12. Major Social Elements of SharePoint 2013
• User Profiles
• Profile management
• People search
• Feed
• Sharing Content
• SkyDrive Pro
• Offline synchronization
• Community Portal & Sites
• Discussion boards
• Feeds
• Microblogging
• Hashtags
• Liking
• Mentioning
• Following
• Yammer

13. Profile Management
• Who are you?
• Identity management from external system
• Self-service profile management
• About Me, Interests
• Search
• Finding people easily
• Ranks people according to proximity

14. Sharing
• Can share both internally and externally
(depending on how the site collection has been
configured)
• Can share with security permissions such as Read
only or Edit
• Sharing a document shows up in the feed

15. Sharing

16. SkyDrive Pro
• Different from SkyDrive, which is available to all
Windows Live/Hotmail/Outlook.com etc. users
• Use sharing to individually share out items stored in
SkyDrive pro (formerly a “My Site”)
• Can synchronize with your hard drive

17. Synch

18. Introducing the New and
Improved Feed
• Visible from user’s profile page
• Central location for keeping track
of interactions across multiple
locations
• Much like a Facebook or Twitter feed, provides a
centralized summary of activities
• Can view a user’s own activity or activities of others
who are interacting with user
• Newsfeed app for Windows Phone and iPhone and
iPad

19. Using the Feed
• “Microblogging” is a fancy word for posting a short
message, a la Facebook or Twitter.
• #Hashtags allow you to follow a thread. You must
“follow” a hashtag in SharePoint to receive updates
about that tag in your feed.
• @Mention people so it shows up in their feed.
• “Like” something, to show your agreement, or
simply acknowledging you saw something.
• Follow people, hashtags, documents, and sites.
• “Follow up” an entry with a task.

20. Creating an Entry

21. Following Up

22. Following a Site

23. Following a Document

24. Activity Log

25. Community Sites and
Community Portal
• The Community Portal is a search-driven page that
surfaces SharePoint site collections and sites in the
SharePoint farm that use the Community Site template
• Community site revolves around discussion boards
• Moderators can create badges and assign badge levels
• Keeps track of user “reputation” based on whether
people respond to a posting, like a posting, mark it as
the answer, etc.
• Moderators can monitor reported posts.

28. Power of the Feed
• Centralized location
• See all my activity, see everyone who is trying to interact with
me
• No need to find out what’s been done in individual locations
around SharePoint
• Mass audience
• Using hashtags and subscription model (i.e. “following”) you
have a way of reaching others without needing to know them
by name (which is different than needing to send an e-mail)
• Asynchronous and archived
• For better or worse, less immediate than e-mail. Much like an
RSS feed, allows you to catch up when you want.
• You, or others, have an archive of activity.

29. Task-Oriented Examples
• Finding out when your question on a discussion
board has been answered.
• Providing incentives to employees based on their
participation in discussion boards to help other
employees
• Following a document so you know when it has
been modified. (More passive than a formal
workflow.)
• Gathering information or input about a
topic, customer, etc.

30. Yammer
• Social networking tool meant for closed networks
(Microsoft-SharePoint MVP network), although it
can be open (SPYam)
• Acquired last year by Microsoft
• Completely hosted solution
• Agile project methodology
• Path to integration with Microsoft products or
Office 365 somewhat unclear

31. Yammer
• Follow people, join groups
• Microblogging, tagging, referencing, liking, “props”
• Share files, calendars, polls, notes, events
• E-mail notifications, alerts
• Client tools for Windows desktop, mobile devices
(but not Windows RT – i.e. Surface – unfortunately)
• Ability to belong to more than one network

34. Q & A