Social Computing with Hosted SharePoint
As we have seen with our “SharePoint Site Hi-light” series, SharePoint Services has been embraced by the corporate world as a robust web solution, but there is so much more to discover. Today, I thought we could take a peak under the hood at some of the features that make SharePoint tops in social computing, too.
My Sites
When you create a social network using SharePoint Services and start adding users, personal spaces on SharePoint are automatically being created for each user you add. These personal spaces are called My Sites, which work like many other social network sites, but with added features and capabilities. Included in each My Site are places to view and manage documents, links, calendar, relationships, and other personal information.
Blogs
Microsoft SharePoint Services include several ways to implement blogs. Actually, every My Site has a blog incorporated. In addition, users can create new SharePoint blog sites and attach them to an existing Team Site. This gives the team a blog that adds extra content and value along with their document repositories, calendars and lists. SharePoint blogs can also be archived and indexed for search, which makes them a repository for collective knowledge.
People Search
People Search is an important SharePoint feature for large or growing organizations. It makes finding the right individuals much easier than with most directories. Multiple types of searches can be used, including by expertise. Results can be sorted by fields like job title or by social distance. Once you choose a result, you’re taken to the public profile of that user which will include all public information that they chose to share.
Wikis
Microsoft SharePoint Services also has built in wikis for sharing information and group collaboration on content. The wikis provided by Microsoft SharePoint include the content management features of SharePoint like version history, document check-in, approval workflows and permissions. One can also upgrade to a low cost dedicated SharePoint server with hyper-v hosting.
This is by far a limited list of the features available through Microsoft SharePoint. Many features that haven’t been discussed here, but we may have given you an idea of the social network and collaboration capabilities of SharePoint. To be honest, there isn’t much you can’t do with this product. What more, now Apps4Rent offers SharePoint 2013 server hosting solutions which comes with a host of enhanced features for social networking.
