SharePoint Grasps for Relevancy in the Realm of Social
June 2, 2015
Ever since the rise of social platforms, SharePoint has attempted to keep up. While many users would say that these attempts were struggled behind the majority of social technology, Microsoft was making an effort to keep their enterprise heading in the social direction. The battle has been long and hard and Redmond Magazine gives the latest update in its article, “Microsoft Looks To Bring Social Back to SharePoint with Office Graph.”
The article describes how Microsoft is more or less stuck between a rock and a hard place in their game of social “keep-up”:
“Not that an enterprise-class team and document collaboration vendor should try to match the capabilities of what are, more often than not, a collection of unsecure, noncompliant, sometimes untested tools . . . But here’s the rub: if you don’t offer end users the tools they want, and make key features available on the mobile devices (and operating systems) they want to use, all of those security, auditing, compliance, and reporting standards will become irrelevant because people won’t use your platform.”
So Microsoft continues to battle for relevancy. Its latest move is Office Graph, and analysts are optimistic that this social layer may finally be a way for Microsoft to deliver on its promise of personalized and intelligent social solutions. To stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the social world of SharePoint, keep an eye on ArnoldIT.com, in particular his SharePoint feed. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and follower of SharePoint. His reporting offers a succinct insight into the developments that affect productivity and user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Delve, Social, and Other SharePoint Highlights of 2014
December 16, 2014
It is that time of year again – time for year-in-review articles regarding the tech that we know and love. And so it is for SharePoint. Lots of changes have been made and there are plenty of assumptions about the future. So CMS Wire tackles the overview in their article, “The SharePoint Landscape from 30,000 Feet.”
The author begins:
“With the end of the year around the corner, it’s a good time to take a 30,000-foot view of the lay of the SharePoint land and see what’s in store for 2015. While SharePoint may not be perfect, the technology is something many enterprises count on. We’ve seen great growth and energy in SharePoint over the past year and there are some events and developments that will be driving the technology next year.”
The author then goes on to discuss Delve and social projects, including apps. But experts caution that privacy will experience a resurgence in coming months, and the pendulum will swing back the other way, with enterprises concerned about keeping a tight reign on information. To stay on top of all of the latest developments in the new year, stay tuned in to Stephen E. Arnold at ArnoldIT.com. He has made a career out of parsing all things search, and his SharePoint feed is extremely helpful for all levels of users.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 16, 2014
Social SharePoint Tips from SharePoint Conference 2014
March 10, 2014
The Internet is full of the latest news, announcements, and tips from SharePoint Conference 2014, #SPC14. It seems that Microsoft has decided to lead with all things social, focusing on their integration with Yammer and other social features to improve collaboration. Read more in the CMS Wire article, “Socializing SharePoint #SPC14.”
The article says:
“Since Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012, it has marched forward with the message of ‘Yammer First.’ The company has encouraged businesses to lead with Yammer whenever possible and promised new integrations that will transform the ways users work together. In two keynotes at the SharePoint Conference yesterday, Microsoft revealed some of the new ways it is integrating Yammer into existing Microsoft tools.”
And the article goes on to describe their takeaways from the sessions. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search, and he follows SharePoint, in and out of the conference season. His Web site, ArnoldIT.com, highlights the pros and cons of various search systems. He recognizes that SharePoint is the biggest and broadest, but when it comes to enterprise infrastructure, it is necessary to customize SharePoint in order to reap benefits in user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 10, 2014
The Social Side of SharePoint
November 19, 2013
While SharePoint is the original enterprise solution for most organizations, many also know that SharePoint is struggling to identify itself in the fast changing world. Its newest iteration as a part of Office 365 has many people talking. Business Management Daily has more in “3 Cool Things about SharePoint in Office 365 Enterprise Editions.”
One particular area of interest is SharePoint’s attempt at social functionality:
“With SharePoint 2010, you could follow sites and tag colleagues. In the 2013 flavor, you can have a newsfeed where you can use social features like hashtags (#) and at tags (@) to track ideas and topics and mention people in your posts. In a news feed for a particular team, you might put hashtags on customer names, industry publication names, or create a tag for a particular issue. Then someone can just click the active tag to see all posts relative to that topic. Use the @tag to give shout-outs to co-workers or to alert someone in a discussion, who might be the best person to contact on a particular subject.”
Arnold IT has followed SharePoint for years, noting SharePoint’s many attempts at social functionality and customers response. (Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime search expert, chronicling his efforts at ArnoldIT.com.) His recent findings point to disappointing social results, despite Microsoft’s best efforts. And still others argue that Microsoft should keep the main mission central, leaving social functions to others, as SharePoint is struggling to even stay relevant as an enterprise search platform.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 19, 2013
SharePoint 2013 Goes Social with Community Templates
October 29, 2012
As users continue to drive demand for social networking features and companies look to increase collaboration among employees, technology is aiming to deliver solutions to fit the need. SharePoint 2013 is no exception as they add social features as well as other smaller configuration improvements to give users more power with a friendlier interface. Jennifer Mason summarizes some of the changes in the coming SharePoint release in her CMSWire.com article, “SharePoint 2013: Intranets with a Side of Social.”
Mason discusses new features including the ability to reuse content across multiple sites, new navigation features, improved search Web part, and changes to design tools. She has this to say about SharePoint’s goal to bring people together with the data they need in a social business context:
The community template provides a way for this type of capability within SharePoint 2013. Community templates have been designed in a way that allows anyone within the organization to join a community and to begin discussions on things relevant to the community. These communities are a great way to share information in a collaborative way, at the same time making intellectual property with the organization available to a larger audience.
Community templates may help bring people together and allow for a new kind of collaboration that previous SharePoint versions simply did not support. While new features are exciting, we also know that out-of-the-box SharePoint tends to have gaps. A complete social business experience also relies on a powerful search feature accessible to all users. One third party application worth looking into is Fabasoft Mindbreeze and their Enterprise Search solution. Mindbreeze connects all company data, including documents, notes, e-mails, calendar entries, contracts, intranet or internet, person- or text-related, and more. In addition, their SharePoint connector allows for a seamless install to complement your existing content management investments.
Philip West, October 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Microsoft Acquires Yammer to Develop Social Business Features for SharePoint
July 20, 2012
Byron Acohido discusses Microsoft’s recent Yammer acquisition in his USAToday.com article, “Microsoft’s Yammer Deal May Cost Too Much, Come Too Late.”
The author comments on the development:
Microsoft has been trying futilely for years to popularize social networking within SharePoint, its collaboration server that comes bundled with versions of its Office productivity suite sold to large businesses. By acquiring Yammer, the software giant is attempting to ‘fill a gap,’ says Wesley Miller, analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft. Similar to Facebook, Yammer connects users and claims more than 200,000 corporate customers, including Ford, Orbitz Worldwide and 7-Eleven.
Yammer will come onto Microsoft as a new division and David Sacks, a former PayPal exec and Yammer founder, will stay on as CEO. Social business is no doubt becoming a ubiquitous topic in the enterprise search world. To tap into new SharePoint possibilities, consider a third party solution to complete your enterprise search system.
We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Managing director Michael Hadrian explains the Mindbreeze solution:
Fabasoft Folio Cloud enables quick, secure and mobile collaboration both internally and between international companies. Business processes with customers and partners cannot be realized any quicker or more cost effectively…This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms.
For a complete search solution with the power of information pairing, check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, July 20, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Bridging the Gap of Social Business Needs with SharePoint
February 3, 2012
Social business, social media, anything social and it is written up as a weakness in SharePoint. Widely adopted as a broad solution, SharePoint is not exactly end-user friendly or intuitive. The SharePoint Social blog conquers this very topic in, “39 Solutions for Doing Social Business with SharePoint.”
The author proposes:
Doing Social Business with SharePoint is easy and hard at the same time. Easy, because SharePoint has lot’s of basic social functions build in like mysites, ratings, content tagging, blogs, wikis, noteboards, and more. Just start to use them. Hard, because the basic out of the box functions SharePoint falls short of many end-user expectations around social. Customization or the addition of third-party products is needed.
Agreeing with the author above, customization of SharePoint or a third-party solution must be implemented. However, third-party solutions are a much easier answer to the question than customization. Saving time and costly man-hours, there are many good third party solutions that seamlessly provide SharePoint end users with the added functionality so desperately needed.
One solution that is particularly smart and efficient is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Its suite of solutions solves all the problems listed by our author, including: mobile, website customization, and connectors to other software. Mindbreeze is one solution that works alongside SharePoint but builds connections through an organization’s entire system.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is the leading solution for fast and comprehensive access to corporate-wide knowledge. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise searches all structured and unstructured data (e-mails, documents, contracts, contacts, notes etc.) within seconds and provides all relevant information structured, prioritized and ready for further use. Staff resources are released to concentrate on their actual task.
Read more about the entire suite of Fabasoft Mindbreeze offerings here.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Lags Behind in Social Features
December 20, 2011
Beyond Search has written extensively on social media and implementations that help to achieve a higher level of social media integration. Recently, we have found more reporting devoted to the incorporation of social features into an organization’s enterprise solution. Bjorn Furuknap gives his insight into SharePoint 2010’s social functionality in his lighthearted blog entry, “Why SharePoint 2010 Social Features Suck.”
Try to get the activity feed to behave like the FaceBook activity feed and add simple things like a ‘Like’ or ‘Comment’ functionality to the feed . . . Try creating an ad-hoc filter of the activity feed, for example to implement a ‘Social Groups’ functionality where a temporary team, say the people in an organization responsible for the next department annual review, can organize their activities into a single activity feed. It turns out that the way the activity feed is implemented is so locked down and restricted that seemingly simple extensions like these are virtually impossible to create.
So how does an organization tackle both its social and enterprise needs? There are several good third party solutions out there, including Fabasoft Mindbreeze, who are devoting time and attention to social features. Fabasoft Mindbreeze has received the prestigious KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year 2011, making it the fourth year in a row that the Austrian enterprise solution took home the prize. In its previous win in 2010, its social media functionality was sited as a major factor.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise covers corporation -wide heterogeneous document stores and data sources such as email systems, file systems, databases, document management systems, intranets, the internet and social media.
We agree with Furuknap that social features, and social media functions, are just now being developed and implemented into enterprise solutions. Microsoft has never been one for rapid adoption or innovation, so SharePoint is suffering a bit in the social department. To meet your organization’s social needs we recommend seeking a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and avoiding unnecessary aggravation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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
Is SharePoint the Answer to the Social Question?
March 30, 2011
I recently read a post which opened with “Technology is about expansion.” I am sure that is on a banner somewhere, or one of those posters meant to inspire the drones. While true, the reality is even among those who are adept in all things tech, experiences like social trends are subjective. If you don’t believe this, engage two IT gurus in a conversation, slip that query in and sit down. You will likely be there for a minute.
“SharePoint: not the Social Answer” is a relevant opinion piece. The author is a former pastor at the church of SharePoint (SP); I say former because he has since converted to what he deems to be a more reliable tool. While his new ‘faith’ is a topic for another time, his experiences with SP are well worth a review. This passage clearly shows his view:
Getting users to understand and adopt social software can be hard in general, but SharePoint has so many options and options within options that users are literally scared of using it. I saw the glazed-over stare of users time and time again when they attempted to use SharePoint. Generally, users would have a specific idea in mind and would attempt to click around hoping the answer would appear. This resulted in one of two things: they would give up or the very persistent would ask IT to walk them through it.
There is a comment for this post that sums up this perspective even more succinctly:
It’s often difficult to explain what’s wrong with SharePoint, because quantitatively speaking, it has it all. It’s the immeasurable stuff that makes it suck.
I was left wondering how widespread this view of SharePoint actually is because I’ve definitely heard the opposite. Where is a good Pew poll when you need it?
Ken Toth, March 30, 2011
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