Your SharePoint Server 2013 personal assets are organized into three distinct hubs:

You can find links to the three hubs on the global navigation bar; therefore, you do not need to specifically visit your My Site to find these three hubs.

Below the global navigation bar, on the Sharing menu, the following links are available:

When you click Newsfeed on the global navigation bar, the Newsfeed hub appears.

The Newsfeed hub contains the following areas:

Because the Newsfeed hub is part of your My Site, you may find that when you first click Newsfeed in the global navigation bar, you have to wait for your My Site to be created before the Newsfeed hub appears. The We’re almost ready! page appears, as well as the Let’s get social! dialog, also known as the My Site privacy notification dialog.

By accepting the default, Let’s get social!, the newsfeed settings are automatically updated to let other users see and respond to site activities. You can modify the newsfeed settings; for example, you can decide whether to receive emails that notify you of events, such as when you have started following another user. You can allow others to see the list of people that you are following or your list of followers, and choose the activities that you want to share with other users. You can also configure your settings to allow just you (Only Me) or other users (Everyone) to see the hashtags that you follow.

In this exercise, you will explore the Newsfeed Settings page.

On Team sites or on the Newsfeed hub, you will find a MicroFeed Web Part, where you can leave a message, usually one hundred words or less, which can be likened to the messages you might leave on a sticky note. This is known as microblogging. On a user’s About Me profile page, you will see a similar Web Part where you will see only the posts generated by the user.

Like many other microblogging systems, SharePoint limits the number of characters that you can use. In SharePoint 2013, the limit is 512 characters, which is more than what is allowed on Twitter. Before posting, you should look at the way other users are using the 512 characters. To get started, search for other users who are influential in your field of interest, and follow them. You can find more information about searching for people in Chapter 9. By following users, you will see all of their posts on your Newsfeed hub. Take note of what the leaders in your niche regularly post about. You will soon recognize that the posts that you like most are from those users who provide great content, great ideas, great links, and breaking news. It is good practice to click the Like link that appears below such posts. The posts that you find interesting also appear in the newsfeeds of the people who follow you. You can view your “likes” later and find these posts again.

Next, you should try to add content that supplements and emulates these posts, and you will start to get a following from users with similar interests. With microblogging, you can

When you share a post on the sites that you are following, the Newsfeed hub displays the post with the site name to the right of your name. This site name is a link to the site, so that you can quickly go to it. When you visit the site, the conversation you posted on the Newsfeed hub will also appear on the newsfeed for the site.

When you microblog, others who read it may reply, and therefore, by microblogging, you have started a conversation. On a collaboration site, anyone who is a contributor to the site can start a conversation. When you start a conversation on your My Site, you can also decide whether to share it with everyone (Public) or on sites that you are following.

As you microblog, you may want to ensure that another user sees the post, in which case you would include her name by adding her name prefixed with an at sign (@). This is often referred to as @mention. Enter the @, followed by sufficient characters to suggest this person in the AutoComplete box.

Initially, the AutoComplete box displays the users that you are following, but as you type more of the characters in a user’s name and fewer users are found, the search is expanded to Everyone. The user’s name becomes a link in the post, which other users can click to view her About Me page. A user is notified when she is mentioned in a post.

When you include the user’s @name on a popular microblog, this user will likely track who is referencing him and come to see who you are! In this way, microblogging encourages the development of conversations with other users.

As you review other users’ microblogs, you will probably have questions for them. If you click the ellipsis to the far right of Like, on the More Options menu, you can click Follow up. This adds a task item to your personal task list. You can also share entire conversations by copying a link to the conversation. Any hashtags that appear in the microblog will also appear on the menu, so that you can quickly follow them.

Alternatively, you can reply to a microblog and ask the user to elaborate; or you can create a new conversation (that is not targeted to a particular user) about a specific topic that you want everyone to see, in the hope that someone will know the answer. In this situation, it is best to include a hashtag symbol (#) before the name of the topic of the question. Keywords that are tagged are dynamically pulled from or added to the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) metadata store.

Similar to @mentions, an AutoComplete box displays MMS tags. You can quickly view all conversations that reference that tag by clicking the tag, which displays the About #<tag> page. This page also allows you to add a description, edit the tag, and add related tags. When you place the cursor over a post, a callout appears, which contains more information about the conversation.

In your conversations, you can include links to list and library apps, as well as list items and documents. You can also add web URLs and modify the URLs to display as text. You can include pictures and videos in your conversation by clicking the camera icon under the conversation text input box.

In this exercise, you will start a conversation on the Newsfeed hub, mention a user, and include a hashtag. You will modify the properties of the hashtag, and then delete the conversation.

Yammer can be used for stand-alone social computing, and as an aggregator of all the social communications that a user might have in an organization. With the Microsoft acquisition of Yammer, there is a kind of a convergence of social computing between SharePoint 2013 and Yammer; however, at the time of this book’s writing, full integration between the two products is not there. However, it looks as if Yammer and SharePoint are going to remain separate products; Yammer will be cloud-based and aimed at organizations, where each organization has its own home Yammer network using its own email address.

In Office 365 you can switch your Enterprise Social Collaboration setting to Yammer, and make Yammer your primary experience. The Newsfeed link on the global navigation bar is replaced with a link to Yammer. A Yammer app is planned for the SharePoint Store, so that you can easily embed a Yammer group feed into a SharePoint site. At that time, guidance will be provided on how organizations who install their own SharePoint environments replace the Newsfeed link. Further Yammer connection updates are expected later in 2013. In the meantime, your organization may view the Yammer newsfeed by displaying Yammer.com in the browser or by using the Yammer Web Part.

Both products have similar social offerings—for example, both SharePoint Server 2013 and Yammer let you create a conversation, and both let you follow objects, such as documents; therefore, the basics described earlier in this chapter are similar in both products.

In this exercise, you will create a conversation using the Yammer Web Part.

In SharePoint 2010, you can tag content on a site or leave a note in a document by using the Tags & Notes command on the Browse tab. In SharePoint 2013, this command is no longer on the Browse tab; however, you can still tag and leave notes on pages, lists, libraries, list items, blogs, wikis, images, and tag profiles. Tagging content helps other users quickly find content using search. When a user searches for a term, content that is tagged with that term will appear higher on the search results page than content that is not tagged with that term.

You can also use the Tag Cloud Web Part to display a visual depiction of the tags used in your site, where the font size of the words that make up the tag name become larger as the frequency of that tag increases. Click a tag in the Tags And Notes dialog or a tag in the tag cloud to display the tag profile page that displays all items that have been tagged with that term and other information. By default, it will only display items that have been tagged in the past 60 days. To search for all items that have been tagged, click All to the right of View. When you create notes, they appear on the tag profile pages and on your thoughts page. You can go to your thoughts page from a tag profile page or by typing http://my.wideworldimporters/personal/_layouts/15/thoughts.aspx, in which http://my.wideworldimporters is the web address where your My Site is hosted in your organization.

In the following exercise, you will use tags and notes on a document.

In SharePoint Server 2013, you can create a Community site where like-minded users can collaborate on a common interest. Such groups were probably in existence in your organization and communicating prior to the creation of the Community sites within SharePoint. They may have previously used discussion lists or forums to facilitate communication and exchange information. Members of a community can ask questions on the Community site, knowing that other members of the community are interested in the topic area and may be able to help these answer questions. Such communities are usually based on job types that span the entire organization, such as nurses, lead firefighters, or project managers.

Community sites consist of members and moderators. Users can view the discussions and become members of the community if they want to contribute to those discussions. Moderators manage the community, for example, by setting rules, reviewing and addressing inappropriate posts, and marking interesting content as featured discussions.

Because Community sites are a means for fostering collaboration among large groups of employees in your organization, you should ensure that you have the appropriate backing within your organization. Depending on your organization, this may mean identifying and obtaining the approval of an official sponsor. You also need the commitment of at least two or three moderators. The moderators should welcome new members, be active in the community, and where appropriate, identify replies to posts as a best reply. In your organization, there may be other guidelines that your moderators and members need to be made aware of. In large communities, you may also consider engaging the help of users to look after discussions that are associated with specific categories.

Categories are created in the Categories list and consist of a name, description, and picture. The list keeps track of the amount of discussions and replies, so that you can quickly review active discussions.

In addition to the Community Site template in SharePoint Server 2013, there is a new enterprise site template, Community Portal, where Community sites throughout an organization are listed and where you can visit to search for Community sites that you might want to join. Depending on the way that SharePoint Server is installed in your organization, you may be able to access the Community Portal from the Sites hub.

Unlike Community sites, once created, a Community Portal requires very little configuration or maintenance by the site owner. The portal is continually updated through tight integration with search, which finds new communities and tracks community statistics such as creation date, number of members, number of discussions, and so forth. The order of Community sites listed on the Community Portal is determined by the number of posts, the number of replies, and the number of members. Posts have a higher weight than replies and members. This means that a community with a smaller number of very active users is considered more popular than a larger, less active community. On the Community Portal home page, you can click the ellipsis to the right of a Community site to display a callout that contains more information.

In the following exercise, you will create a community subsite.

Once you create your Community site, you can manage discussions, categories, members, reputation settings, and other community settings. The Community Site template is based on the Team Site template and uses wiki pages stored in the Site Pages library. It contains the Discussions, Categories, Badges, and Community Members lists.

When you create a Community site with unique permissions, an additional SharePoint Group, named Moderators, is created. It is mapped to the Moderate permission level, which allows moderators to view, add, update, delete, and moderate list items. Members can view, add, update, and delete list items and documents; however, they can only read the Categories and Members list items and site pages.

The Community Members list is used to maintain those users who are members of the Community site, as well as their reputation settings. The Members page displays the Members list, which can be sorted by Top contributors, New members, A–Z, or Z–A.

The more that a community member contributes, the higher his reputation. A community owner controls the points for each activity, and can configure point thresholds that are required for the five achievement levels. These achievement levels can be displayed on the Members page as either text or an image.

Community owners can also assign gifted badges to members in recognition of their contributions to the community or their expertise. A member can only be assigned one gifted badge; and when it is assigned to a member, the achievement level for that user is not visible on the Members page, only the badge.

You can also use the Community Settings page to allow members to report abusive content. Site owners and moderators can review the reported material, and then either remove it or reinstate it.

The Community site home page consists of the following areas:

In the following exercise, you will upload an image into the Site Assets library that will be used for a category. You will create a category, add a discussion for that category, and then modify the reputation settings for the site.