Social Networking Tool Advances

My Site personal websites have often been derided for not providing particularly useful tools and features (with user abandonment a direct corollary). However, Microsoft has completely revamped My Site websites and the social networking tools in SharePoint 2010, so they now provide an extremely powerful set of tools to enhance collaboration between SharePoint users and encourage interaction with the SharePoint environment. To point out a few examples, users can provide ratings to items in lists and libraries that enable them to determine as a group the most valuable assets in that list or library using one to five stars. Users can also post their own tags or use centrally managed tags, or post notes as shown in Figure 1.9. Again, this toolset separates the functionality available in SharePoint from that of the basic file share and encourages collaboration between users, and just as important, interaction with the data.

Figure 1.9. Note board in use in a document library.

My Site websites have undergone a dramatic makeover, as shown in Figure 1.10, where a slew of new tools are visible, including My Newsfeed, My Content, Tags and Notes, and tools familiar to SharePoint 2007 users, such as Organization, Colleagues and Memberships. Chapter 22 provides additional insights into the value of these enhanced tools to the organization.

Figure 1.10. Updated look and feel and features of My Site.