Microsoft Social Computing Overview

Notes from Christian Finn, Director, Social Computing

• 13 sessions in "social track"
• Microsoft design point is to co-mingle structured collaboration tools alongside social computing tools - it's unrealistic to think of social computing disconnected from collaborations strategies
• Back to information workers and productivity ... find knowledge, share ideas, work in teams, feel valued, manage projects, build= a network and use content
• Long-term ROI of social computing is helping information workers feel valued (e.g., via comments from peers, ratings, etc)
• Microsoft also thinks of the IT Pro ... control costs, provide solutions, maintain security, do more with less, ensure compliance, reduce islands, etc
• This situation also causes users experience is fractured across too many tools and silos
• The challenge for IT: If you are in IT - they are asking for consumer versions of sites for internal use - but arguments raised re: compliance, security, etc.
• The challenge for the Enterprise: Connecting the dots is the challenge of the enterprise ... need to locate expertise, build community between people as a result of mergers, or onboard new employees
• Social Computing lowers the cost for sharing and organizing ... surfaces knowledge and networks (expertise) and increase employee engagement
• Pitfalls: Demographics, hierarchy, policies, culture, etc
• Microsoft believes SharePoint scales to meet as narrow or broad a view an organization has on social computing, you can use it in a very classic way - no MySite etc - keep with basic document libraries, forums, workspaces - or - you can use blogs, wikis, profiles, etc - all in one platform.
• Customer examples: Accenture (extensive use of MySite, social distance), skill attributes used for staffing, etc), Electronic Arts (very strong from a user experience and aesthetic viewpoint). Looks more like Facebook, supports skins for different product areas, etc. British Telecom used podcasting kit for just-in-time learning. Supports knowledge retention (interviews, user-generated videos on best practices).
• SharePointM social journey began with MySite 2003 (disagree that Microsoft had any clue of social computing in 2003 though - some recasting history here)
• Demo
  • MySite: much cleaner UI, less form-like, softer blending of UI elements, typical stuff (name, presence, phone, etc), can use Business Connectivity Services to bring in HR data etc, free-form text for entry of ad-hoc information, redesign of middle section of MySite - tabs for organization, colleagues, tags, memberships etc) - supported by privacy settings.
  • Note Board emulates Facebook Wall type interface - can have Note Board on documents, sites, not just "wall". can have list of comments ala discussion stream
  • Personal tag cloud - when clicked will find people and artifacts
  • Tag Profile: way to aggregate all the people who are using a tag inside the organization... can "follow" tag - do a people search and locate all people associated with that tag
  • MyNetwork is a running newsfeed - stream, river of news model - activity stream comes close to social messaging (Twitter) but not sure I would go that far - seems more "FriendFeed" like.
  • Follow a tag results in event being posted into news stream - way to discover people and artifacts - passive signal model
  • Colleagues ... social graph, Facebook friends, can organize colleagues into groups with privacy controls at group level
  • Filters for newsfeed
  • Organization: org browser is an overlay directory to find people and their relationship to the organization ... not sure who someone works for, where they report in the org structure - Silverlight and HTML version. See digest, direct reports, etc and then can link to full profile - can control delegation
  • Content: similar to 2007 version - can share documents, etc.
  • Status message shows up in news feed Note: wonder how this works with OCS presence status? Opportunity for integration but doubt that there is any linkage right now. Visa-versa - can OCS/Communicator status be sent to news feed - maybe too much noise (on phone, busy) but maybe not
  • Blogs: Much improved UI ... actually looks like a blog ... more Ajax type UI for posting ... maybe not as great as Wordpress or other tools but likely good enough for many situations ... believe you can use Live Writer as well (better choice in my opinion for authoring)
  • Note: Wonder if there is a blogs central type catalog - does not sound like it.
  • Video streaming built into SP2010 ... natively stream of video up to 2GB from store ... ratings supported ... Silverlight player
  • Wikis: two varieties ... team site wiki:  as people move from documents to web pages as medium of information exchange, need to support this within team sites - rich text editor ... bar was really low, previous version of wiki really was not a wiki so this implementation is a significant advancement ... oddly, don't use wiki term. Also have Enterprise Wiki (different) - more like Wikipedia - build on publishing model ... page publishing and categorizing of pages (then why call it a Wiki?) ... access controls supported and versioning ... can chose to have workflow aroudn wiki as well (ex: HR policies database). Under the cover all of this are in lists so blogs, wikis can have workflow attached.
  • Enterprise Wiki surface is a publishing template so you can put web parts and other artifacts like video.
  • Note: people will have to keep close track of team wiki vs. enterprise wiki - different capabilities and different implementations! Will not be able to take a team wiki and promote it to an enterprise wiki for example.
  • Records management and social computing: can apply rules (disposition etc) to blogs, wikis, etc.
  • Note: I still do not believe there are sufficient data loss controls, audit logs, etc here - Msft needs to prove that the support for security, identity and privacy needs much more thoroughly beyond demoware.
  • No iPhone application - too bad :)
• Customization: REST, JSON, ATOM, etc.

Comments

[Mark Bower]

Re: "Status message shows up in news feed Note: wonder how this works with OCS presence status? Opportunity for integration but doubt that there is any linkage right now"
In TownSquare (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/06/12/screenshot-of-microsoft-townsquare-social-networking-at-work/) - the Office Labs pilot for this feature - One way sync from Communicator to TownSquare was built-in, so don't bet against seeing this before RTM.