This is an interesting article published by the (Microsoft) SharePoint Products and Technology Team tying together some of the features typically found in Web 2.0 Social Network sites like Facebook with features and capabilities of SharePoint 2007. It's an "interesting perspective" and view of how aspects of SharePoint and Active Directory can be used to essentially build an internal or "Corporate Social Network" with SharePoint's out of the box functionality, with a little bit of customization. You might think it's a bit of a stretch initially (as I did), but if you are a SharePoint Developer-type, you can start to see how you could actually pull it off with a bit of customization (i.e., Development) and some pre-existing web parts. It has me thinking....
Here's the snippet from the article that outlines the approach demonstrated (mostly via screen-shots of MOSS)
The goal for many organizations is to optimize their social networking experience by combining heterogeneous personnel information into an Office SharePoint Server user profile. By combining this information and modifying user profile properties, organizations can enrich the presentation of team and colleague information to organization members. In order to accomplish this goal, organizations require a carefully planned strategy when combining multiple sources of personnel information to provide a rich user profile for social networking using SharePoint Products and Technologies.
The following sections outline the features, patterns and practices involved with implementing social networking with Office SharePoint Server in an organization. These strategies will assist administrators in offering a full-fidelity social networking experience to organization members that build on solid heterogeneous directory and personnel data management. By selecting and implementing a strategy for enriched user profile creation, Office SharePoint Server can present relevant colleague, organizational hierarchy and team information to information workers.
Here's a link (Click here) to the full article. It's not a long read, but one that I found to be interesting. I am going to start to think about how a SharePoint Developer can take this to the next level and get even closer to the features found in the Internet Social Networking sites, such that those features could be more easily bought into and managed in a corporate network environment with SharePoint.
I'd love to here from the SharePoint Developers out there to hear what they think about "Modding" SharePoint in such a way that it could be a fully featured Social Networking solution for Corp. America (beyond the Wiki/Blog templates that are in the product).
Let me know what you think,
~ Robert Shelton
↑ Grab this Headline Animator