This is the last article in a three-part series that discusses social networking with SharePoint Server 2010. In “SharePoint 2010 Goes Social, Part 1” and “SharePoint 2010 Goes Social, Part 2”, I described the importance of the user profile and how to synchronize it with Active Directory (AD). In this article, I describe the major features that build on the user profile to leverage an often forgotten information source—its people. Note that the social networking features described in this series are available only with a SharePoint Server 2010 installation. They aren’t available in a SharePoint Foundation 2010–only deployment.
As mentioned in the previous articles, it’s crucial to have a rich user profile, which means that everyone needs to be willing to enter details about themselves and the projects they’re working on so that other people can discover this information and build linkages out of it. Some of this information can be imported from other information sources (such as synchronizing the user profile with AD), but generally it’s the users themselves who know what skills they have and what they’re working on.
The SharePoint designers know that most people generally won’t go out of their way to provide such information. And if they do provide it, they tend to be fairly lethargic in keeping the information up-to-date. This is why SharePoint provides tools that are geared toward automatically keeping certain information up-to-date and presenting the user with opportunities to update other pertinent information in a seamless and simple fashion. I’ll now describe the major tools that can help people discover “who knows who,” “who knows what,” and “who is doing what,” which results in a vibrant and therefore worthwhile social network.
My Site at the Center
Assuming your organization wants to fully leverage SharePoint’s social networking features, every user will have what is known as a My Site. There are three feature areas that are delivered through My Site, and there are permissions that control the availability of these features. By default, these permissions are enabled for all authenticated users. You can customize these permissions by using the Manage User Permissions option in the User Profile Service application, which you can access through the SharePoint Central Administration site.
The permissions are as follows:
- Use Personal Features. This permission gives users the ability to advertise details about themselves to others through their public profile pages. Users can also maintain some of the details that are displayed (such as the About Me information) and control certain aspects of the details (such as who is allowed to view them). Users can access this feature set from the My Profile tab in their personal home pages.
- Create Personal Site. This permission gives users the ability to create a standard team site for their own personal use. In this site, users can store personal documents and documents that they want to share with others. Users can access this feature set from the My Content tab in their personal home pages.
- Use Social Features. This permission gives users the ability to use social features (e.g., social tagging, colleagues) and have an activity feed that shows their colleagues’ recent activities. Users can access these features from many places, including the My Newsfeed tab in their personal home pages.
Users can quickly access their personal home pages on My Site by clicking their names in the top right corner of most SharePoint pages. This reveals a drop-down list that includes links to their personal home page and public profile. As users navigate in particular areas of SharePoint, many of the links that they’ll encounter will take them to the public profile of other users. For example, if a search result relates to a person, the search results will link to that person’s profile page.
My Profile Page
The page that renders the profile page is named person.aspx, and it resides in a site collection known as the My Site Host. Each User Profile Service application is associated with one My Site Host. You can control the My Site Host with the Setup My Sites option in the Settings page of the User Profile Service application. If you want to change the default location for the My Site Host, you need to use the My Site Host site template or a blank template to create the site collection where the My Site Host will reside. You also need to make sure that the site actually exists at the top level of the Web Application that’s used for the My Site Host. Otherwise, people won’t be indexed by the search engine.
Person.aspx is a multi-tabbed page. The details it displays depends on who the requesting user is and the query strings that are passed to the page. If person.aspx is called with no query strings, the profile of the current user is displayed. However, the page is also used to show the public profile of users to other users. In this case, the details that are displayed depend on the relationship that exists between the two users. For example, Figure 1 shows the result of the user named Kevin Laahs viewing the profile of the user named Jenny Lies. In this case, the person.aspx page was called as follows:
http://<My Site Host>/person.aspx?AccountName=laahs\jenny