SharePoint: Embracing Social Functions and Features
September 7, 2011
The future of search is a subject that sparks a conversational camp fire. After email, search is one of the principal uses of online systems. In the last year, traditional key word search has been altered by the growing demand for “social content.” The idea is not just to index online discussions, but to use the signals these conversations emit as a way to improve the relevance of a search.
For example, when Lady Gaga sends her fans a Twitter message, the response and diffusion of that message provides useful information to a search system. A query about a fashion trend sent to Bing and Google, for example, will “respond” to the Lady Gaga message and include the retweets of her content as an indication of relevance.
This could apply to enterprise search. It could be possible to configure a mainstream solution such as Microsoft Fast Search Server to respond to social content.
A solid overview of what is possible is available in the InfoWorld article, “If You Must Have In-House Social Tools, Go With SharePoint.” Examples of SharePoint’s social tools are support for Weblogs, the “I Like It” tags, notes, and profiles pages. InfoWorld explains how these tools will contribute to user satisfaction and help enhance the findability of content within an enterprise SharePoint installation. The implementation of social functions falls upon SharePoint administrators. Coincident with the release of the social tools, InfoWorld points out that user training is helpful. The article makes this important point:
I’m not a fan of social networking tools at work. I believe it distracts people more than it provides value. Call me a dinosaur, but when I want to say something important to the entire company, I use this ancient system called email. Maybe I’m not a team player because I don’t like collaborating on documents; if I need your help on a document, I’ll email it to you and you can look it over.
My view is that social networking has a time and a place, is beneficial, and should be taken in small quantities.
“Enjoy Maximum Collaboration with the Help of SharePoint” is especially thought provoking. The author said:
What SharePoint applications do is the customization, configuration and the development of Intranet, Extranet and the portals of information that are present on SharePoint.
My thought is that SharePoint does not perform customization. SharePoint must be configured and tuned to deliver certain types of functions. In our experience, SharePoint requires additional scripts. The default services deliver access to document libraries to manage content, generate reports, locate services, and share content across a wide network. However, social features may warrant changes to the SharePoint infrastructure to ensure that content throughout performance is not compromised and make certain indexing processes receive additional tuning to handle the social content if needed. Due to the abbreviated form of some social content, additional metadata may be required to enhance the findability of a short message.
Search Technologies has implemented social functions into Microsoft SharePoint. The Search Technologies’ team has the experience to derive the maximum benefit from the services which Microsoft includes with SharePoint. In addition, our engineers can implement special features as well as install, configure, and tune third party add-ins from Microsoft certified software developers.
Social has arrived and SharePoint is the ideal platform to use to take advantage of this fast growing content type.
Iain Fletcher, September 7, 2011
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2 Responses to “SharePoint: Embracing Social Functions and Features”
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This article again compromises the objective view of your blog. It is a shameless plug for Search technologies products and consultancy.
I am depreciating the contents of your (in the past valuable) articles because of this.
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