Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)

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Define Your Governance Plan

Ideally, you thought about your governance plan when you were reading Chapter 4, “Planning for Business Governance.” If you have not yet thought about how you want to approach governance for the social features in SharePoint 2013, it’s time to do it now. The most important general governance policy when it comes to social features is to not allow users to post anonymous content. To get value from social features, people need to know who is posting content. “Owning” your social content helps ensure that everyone plays by the rules and makes it very easy to ensure that governance policies are followed.

Configuring the User Profile

The user profile contains attributes about each user such as name, e-mail address, organizational hierarchy, skills, and phone numbers. Some of this information can be automatically populated from a system of record such as Active Directory or a human resources information system. SharePoint 2013 has several standard user attributes that are provided out of the box, and these can be customized and extended to meet the needs of your organization. You have most of the same capability to change the user profile attributes in SharePoint Online as you do when you install SharePoint 2013 on-premises.

The user profile is where individuals can specify their privacy settings for what fields are shown to everyone within the organization or are just available for personal reference. This is also where preferences are set for what activities people want their followers to see about themselves in their newsfeed and what events they want to be notified about via e-mail.

The first item for which your users will need some “social” guidance is their profile. Figure 15-3 shows an example of the Basic Information section of the SharePoint 2013 user profile. One challenge organizations often face when introducing SharePoint is getting people to create their initial profiles. It’s very frustrating to search for people in organizations where some users have a well-defined profile and others have virtually no content. Consider hosting a profile-building “jam session” to encourage users to create their initial profiles. One organization created a rap video to get employees to update their profiles and showed the video at an all-hands meeting. In the back of the conference room, they set up several “kiosks” (tables with laptops) where users could update their profiles during breaks and after the meeting ended. Another organization hosted a very successful “profile week” where the department that completed the highest percentage of profiles was given the opportunity to select a charity to which the organization donated $1,000. The campaign was part of a “do good for us and do good for others” message that was very well received and resulted in the majority of the staff creating a meaningful user profile.

Figure 15-3 SharePoint 2013 user profile

Your governance plan should have a suggested format for the “About me” description and provide examples of well-written descriptions. Users will want to know what you expect them to write in their “About me” statement, and they will be especially interested in understanding how much personal versus work information is appropriate. An HR executive recommended a 90/10 rule for content in the “About me” area. She suggested that in her organization, she would expect 90% of the “About me” content to be work-related and about 10% personal.

Consider whether or not you want users to be able to upload a picture of their choice and whether or not you need to provide guidance for the types of pictures that are acceptable. If you plan to automatically populate pictures from another source (for example, badge pictures), check with your legal and human resources departments to find out any requirements to allow users to opt out of sharing a picture. And consider local laws about sharing and storing any personal information, including pictures, as you plan for the attributes you will capture in the user profile.

The Ask Me About field is particularly important to address in your governance plan. For example, at what degree of knowledge is it appropriate for users to say that you can ask them about a topic? How well do you have to know something before you should declare this expertise to your colleagues? Do you want users to declare that you can ask them about any topic in which they are interested or only those in which they have some degree of expertise? The answers to these questions will likely vary based on the nature and even size of your organization, but you will want to provide some guidance to users about what is or is not appropriate based on the outcomes you are trying to achieve. Topics that users identify in their Ask Me About profiles are weighted higher in search results, so it is important to clearly identify what type of information should be included in this part of the profile. If expertise location is among your business objectives, you might want to think about the following guidelines for users:

Add a topic to your Ask Me About profile if you have advanced knowledge of that discipline, even if you are not necessarily using that knowledge in your current role. This should mean that you have used the discipline extensively and can assist others in applying it to complex problems or that you are a true expert—you are experienced in all aspects of the discipline and are able to develop creative solutions to complex problems and can educate others.

Also add a topic to your Ask Me About profile if you know the discipline is new or new to the organization, even if all you can do is answer basic questions and direct inquiries to people with more expertise.

Figure 15-4 shows the fields in the Details area of the profile.

Figure 15-4 SharePoint 2013 profile details

You will certainly want to provide guidance about adding information to the “Past projects” field if you are going to use it. This property is very difficult to keep up-to-date if users are expected to maintain it manually. As a general rule, it is better to hide or remove a field rather than allow it to go stale, so if you plan to use this profile attribute, be sure that you have an organizational process that ensures that it will be maintained over time.

Decide whether or not you want to include Skills and Interests (refer to Figure 15-4) in the profile. Most organizations find a lot of value in encouraging users to include personal interests (within reason, of course) and relevant skills that they have that might not be used in their current assignment, such as language skills or experience with specific technologies that the organization may not be using at this time. Some organizations find that the field for Skills is too informal and unstructured to be of much value. In this case, it is helpful to replace the Skills list with a more structured list of suggested skills so that users select meaningful values. In one organization, a user entered “Jack of All Trades, Master of None” in his skills list. Not only is this entry not helpful, but because a comma was used as a separator, this user actually was identified as having two separate skills—Jack of All Trades and Master of None—so the joke didn’t even work. At a minimum, you need to provide guidance regarding what types of skills are relevant if you choose to use this field. Skills and Interest values are “sourced” from the enterprise keywords list. An easy way to ensure consistency in this list is to “prime” the enterprise keywords list before you launch.

Many organizations worry about privacy issues when it comes to exposing birthdays, even if you are exposing only month and day. Be sure to check with your HR or legal departments, but in our experience, people really like to know this information about their colleagues. Many HR departments allow the information to be shared as long as providing it is “opt in,” but in some countries, even an “opt in” field is not acceptable. As with all personal fields in a user profile, you have the option of removing them, but if you choose to use them, be sure to define your governance policies for their use and maintenance. Refer to Chapter 4, “Planning for Business Governance,” for additional issues to consider regarding governance of profile information.

In SharePoint 2010, users had the ability to restrict who could see some of their personal information to just their colleagues or manager. This capability is not available in SharePoint 2013. There are only two visibility options for attributes in the profile: Only Me and Everyone. You can change whether a user can set the visibility for an attribute at the organization level for many attributes, but individual users get only two choices.

The last section of the profile allows users to set their preferences for how they want to be notified about the events associated with their newsfeed. These attributes allow users to control the amount of information they receive to prevent information overload and ensure that they are focused on the social information that they find most helpful. Figure 15-5 shows the available Newsfeed Settings in the user profile.

Figure 15-5 SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed Settings

Managing Newsfeed Posts

Many users will not need guidance regarding what type of content is appropriate for an enterprise newsfeed post—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a social media policy that reminds users of what is and isn’t appropriate. If your organization does not already have a social media policy in place, the Online Database of Social Media Policies, available at http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php, is an excellent reference that includes many examples of social media policies to leverage as a starting point.

Users may need guidance regarding when it is appropriate to use a newsfeed to have a conversation rather than e-mail or a discussion list. Use the concepts in Table 15-5 to help promote the use of and guidance for newsfeeds.

Managing Blogs and Wikis

Many of the barriers to social computing described earlier are expressed in the context of blogs and wikis. The objections rarely play out with any negative consequences, but they are very real to the executives who express them. Your governance plan should explicitly address policies and content for blogs and wikis, including how content will be maintained and removed.

Wikipedia provides an excellent resource for governance policies for enterprise wikis that are known as the “Five Pillars of Wikipedia.” These rules define how conflicts will be resolved and prescribe a code of conduct for all contributors.⁴ Consider assigning a moderator for each wiki site. The moderator is an individual who agrees to be accountable for providing oversight to the wiki site, with a role similar to the role of a moderator for a community site. The moderator periodically checks to see that content pages are complete, that the site’s organization still makes sense, and that content is appropriate.

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Understanding Likes and Ratings

Likes and ratings are two alternative ways that users can acknowledge a newsfeed post, a discussion entry, or a document or list item in an app where this feature has been enabled. Both approaches provide a way to indicate agreement and collect support.

Likes provide a way to indicate agreement or affinity with an item. (As with consumer social sites like Facebook, there is no corresponding “dislike” to indicate disagreement.) Ratings allow users to evaluate an item on a five-point scale. Ratings are more controversial and probably deserve more thorough attention in your governance plan because users need to understand what you are asking them to rate—for example, do ratings apply to the quality of the writing or the usefulness of the content or something else entirely? If you are going to leverage ratings in a list or library, the best practice is to provide context or direction so that users understand what you are asking them to rate.

Deciding whether to use star or like ratings will largely be based on your organizational culture and style. We expect that most organizations will choose to use the like rating method since it is more consistent with other areas for providing social feedback within SharePoint (such as in newsfeeds and discussion posts), and it is not as specific and granular as trying to determine whether to rate something as two or three stars. For some organizations or departments within an organization, having a more precise star rating system may be desirable. This is why SharePoint offers the choice and flexibility to make this selection at the list level.

Understanding Social Tags

Social tags allow users to add their own personal metadata to content, which supplements the authoritative metadata assigned by content owners. Users can click the Tags and Notes icon to associate their own personal terms to a document. Note that the social tags added by individual users are stored in the system-wide keywords term store as managed metadata. The hashtags associated with discussion or newsfeed posts are stored in the separate hashtags term store. The tag might describe what the content contains or what it does or just add the user’s personal term for the topic covered by the content. Because these keyword tags are intended to be personal, you don’t want your governance plan to be overly directive about what users should do. In SharePoint 2013, social tags are not used in search refinement, ranking, or recall by default, but you could create custom search experiences that leverage social keyword tags. If your organization chooses to do this, you may want to provide some additional guidance about keyword tagging for users.

Managing Discussions

The simple discussion list from earlier versions of SharePoint has an entirely new life in SharePoint 2013; it forms the foundation of the concept behind a community site. If you have existing team sites, you can activate community features to get the enhanced discussion list in them.

One of the challenges with the previous versions of the discussion list in SharePoint was that the user experience for discussion lists did not facilitate engaging users. The new community features for discussion lists and the Community Site template add moderation and gamification capabilities to conversations that can encourage participation, which can, in turn, help ensure that discussions provide value to the organization. There are two types of features that you will need to evaluate as part of your social strategy and governance plan:

Moderation. Community sites and team sites with community features activated include a new security role for a moderator. Among other things, an important role of the moderator is to pay attention to the conversations inside the community site to ensure that great content and great contributors are recognized and to keep conversations going by monitoring the list of unanswered questions. Assigning a moderator to a discussion forum has always been our recommended best practice—and with SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has provided features to help a forum moderator be more effective. Moderators manage the community conversations by setting rules, reviewing and addressing inappropriate posts, marking interesting content as featured discussions, and marking an answer as a best reply. Moderators can also assign gifted badges to specific members to visually indicate that the member is recognized as a specific kind of contributor in the community, such as an expert or a moderator. Each community contains information about member and content reputation, which members earn when they actively post in discussions, and when their content is liked, replied to, or marked as a best answer.

While it is likely that the time involved in moderation will diminish once a community gets going and becomes more vibrant, active, and self-managed, the role is a critical one nonetheless. You will need to consider who will fill this role for each community and how much time and how many people are needed to focus on critical community forums. The best community moderators are users who are already interested and active members of the community. Emerging experts in a subject area make particularly good moderators because they already have an incentive to learn more about what is going on in their emerging area of expertise. In the best communities, moderation is far more than an administrative role. Since it can take time to be a good moderator, you might want to consider sharing or rotating moderator responsibilities so the burden is not too great on any one person.

Gamification. As described in Chapter 7, “Planning Your Adoption Strategy,” gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context. Three basic elements of games are incorporated in the SharePoint 2013 community features: points, badges, and leaderboards. SharePoint 2013 includes the ability to assign and collect reputation points within a community based on how a user participates. Points can be accumulated so that a user can earn a particular level status or “badge” within the community. Moderators can also “gift” badges to specific members to visually indicate that the member is recognized as a specific kind of contributor in the community, such as a subject matter expert or a moderator. Members of a community earn points when they actively post in discussions and when their content is liked, replied to, or marked as a best answer. While this can be fun and engaging in some communities, it may be completely inappropriate in others. Moreover, if people are actively participating in conversations because they really enjoy helping others, rewarding them with points might actually backfire because the visible recognition might make the activity that people love seem more like work—which will defeat the purpose. Be sure that the gamification features in SharePoint 2013 community sites are appropriate for your community—and that you have a plan for evaluating how these features can be used as part of your overall adoption strategy. At the time of publication, SharePoint 2013 includes only a limited amount of functionality to support gamification. If you determine that more capabilities are required, you can develop them using custom code or consider integrating a third-party product such as Badgeville (www.badgeville.com).

Another consideration for social governance is determining how aggressive to be about regulating social content. Community features in SharePoint 2013 include the option to enable the capability to report abuse to the moderator. Other social features of SharePoint 2013, including the newsfeed, do not have this capability. Should you be concerned? Probably not. Unlike the Internet, people communicating within an enterprise social environment generally understand the rules of engagement. Just as your users probably know better than to send a nasty e-mail or post certain types of documents and photos, they also know better than to post inappropriate comments. However, as stated earlier, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a social media policy. Within SharePoint, every element of content, including social activities, has an associated user ID and timestamp logged. But, as the saying goes, “you can say anything you want on your last day at the organization.”

While there are legitimate business needs for restricting and monitoring content, especially in highly regulated industries, you should look for a balance between being too restrictive and being too flexible. If your business outcome goal is to encourage information sharing, you probably don’t want to have every post and comment go through a formal review process. Instead, you may want to consider leveraging SharePoint’s search, retention policy, and eDiscovery capabilities to have a regular process for identifying and handling inappropriate content. You should also be sure to update your existing acceptable use and HR policies to reflect the new capabilities—just as organizations did when e-mail, the Internet, and instant messaging were first introduced.

Many organizations seek to reward contributors to encourage a change in behavior. There are many reasons for this. First, there is great benefit in getting conversations out in the open and sharing information more broadly than individual e-mail threads. This creates an opportunity for information to be discovered and leveraged by others. Second, it is helpful for an organization to get the real-time pulse from their employees about what is on their minds and what the key concerns and questions are—this is a key benefit of the public newsfeed. Third, organizations often prefer encouraging the use of internal enterprise social tools for information sharing and debate because internally, the discussions can be audited and secured. Without a safe, internal forum, your users may leverage public consumer social tools like Twitter or Facebook for what should be a private internal conversation. As stated earlier, avoiding insecure public tools can be an important benefit of leveraging the social computing capabilities available within SharePoint 2013 and Yammer.

Define a “Do-able” Pilot Project

A small deployment pilot for an audience predisposed to adopt new technologies is a good way to create a successful outcome for SharePoint social features. Your goal is to find a community that is going to create an initial critical mass of information with a well-connected and vocal leader. As you deploy more broadly, users will see and benefit from this initial content and ideally be inspired to contribute themselves, especially if your vocal leader uses every opportunity to talk about the benefits. Building support from the ground up allows you to attract rather than mandate participation. Look for a community that may already be using social technologies as a good candidate for your pilot. For additional recommendations for successfully launching and encouraging adoption for social computing features, refer to Chapter 7, “Planning Your Adoption Strategy.”

Prepare a Launch and Communications Plan

Use the feedback from your pilot to help plan an organization-wide launch plan. Be sure to capture user stories focused on how the social features helped them do their jobs more effectively. Use these stories in your communications activities to help spread the value proposition across the enterprise. Consider how you might want to use incentives to drive initial participation. Refer to Chapter 7 for specific examples of effective communications strategies.

The most successful technology solutions are designed so that employees can use them easily without the need for special training. However, you can’t assume that everyone in the organization is familiar with social technologies and how to use them effectively, even if the technology itself is very intuitive. Your launch plan will need to ensure that users understand the value proposition for the technologies as well as how to use them to be more effective.

Consider that the successful adoption of most of the SharePoint social features requires the organization to change—and for individual users to change the way they work. Therefore, it’s especially important to be patient. You may be able to launch your pilot in a very short period of time, but the organizational and cultural changes required to sustain a social computing initiative take time, sometimes as long as several years, and you may need to wait a while before their use becomes pervasive. At the same time, remember that you don’t need 100% participation to achieve value with social technologies. Often, getting the right set of users solving meaningful business problems is far more valuable (and encouraging) than setting a target for 100% participation.

In addition, for social programs to succeed, people need to feel that it is OK to use the technology to speak openly (within appropriate human resources policies, of course!) without fear of retribution or censorship. If your organization is not comfortable with this concept, you may want to defer or limit the scope of your social strategy.

Using Social Features to Engage Others and Get Work Done

In earlier releases of SharePoint, the center of “social gravity” was the My Site. In SharePoint 2013, the concept of a My Site has evolved and the term is actually no longer being used—though there really is no good single replacement term for the “set of features and functions previously known as the My Site.” If you still want to use the term My Site, that’s OK—we won’t tell anyone. What makes SharePoint 2013 really different is that there is really no one single place that is the center of social gravity anymore. In fact, there are multiple places where users can engage to get work done. This section approaches the social features of SharePoint 2013 from the perspective of the individual and describes how individual users can leverage each core element.

Personal SharePoint 2013 Sites

Your personal space in SharePoint 2013 is much more than a site where you share documents—it is where you go to see what is important to you. Your newsfeed (see Figure 15-6) shows you what is new for the people, sites, documents, and tags that you are following. You can interact with this activity feed—for example, by replying to newsfeed updates or liking activities done by others. As stated earlier, the newsfeed examples in this edition of the book show the internal SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed. Depending on if, how, and when your organization chooses to integrate Yammer for newsfeed-type conversations, the newsfeed in your SharePoint deployment may look different. One thing to note is that while Yammer can be integrated with SharePoint on-premises and/or SharePoint Online, Yammer is exclusively a cloud-based storage solution, so that should be considered as part of your deployment strategy.

Figure 15-6 SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed

When others visit your personal site (Figure 15-7), they can view content that you have shared with them such as documents or blog posts and see the people who are following you as well as those whom you are following. They can also view your recent activities such as newsfeed posts or replies you have made, new sites or documents that you are following, and community site posts to which you have replied.

Figure 15-7 Viewing another person’s personal site

In SharePoint 2013, your personal site still includes a repository in which you can publish your personal documents. However, in this release, there are no longer separate “personal” and “shared” document libraries. By default, your personal site has a single document library called SkyDrive Pro (Figure 15-8). The default permission setting for this library is Private for all content except for those items saved in the Shared with Everyone folder. Permissions for this special folder are set to View Only for everyone in the organization by default. You can create and share folders or documents with others from your personal SkyDrive Pro by inviting them and specifying whether they should have View Only or Edit permissions. This approach is more consistent and familiar with how consumer file-sharing services function. It allows you to have a single document library that you can access across your various devices and selectively share content with others.

Figure 15-8 SkyDrive Pro

Your personal site is also where you can view all tasks assigned to you across the various SharePoint 2013 sites of which you are a member, your Exchange 2013 tasks, and your Project Server 2013 tasks. This capability solves a problem that existed in earlier versions of SharePoint where tasks (e.g., workflow assignments to review or approve items) were scattered across multiple individual sites. With SharePoint 2013, you now have a central view and a single place to review and update tasks assigned to you (Figure 15-9). From your main newsfeed, you can mark conversation posts or replies for follow-up and have those items show as tasks in the consolidated task view on your personal site. This feature makes the social features more actionable and improves SharePoint’s ability to support getting work done.

Figure 15-9 SharePoint 2013 personal task list

Newsfeed

Consider the following tips to get the most out of working with your newsfeed:

@Mention others in your post to focus their attention. To direct a post to someone, type the @ symbol and a list of related names appears. When you select the person to mention, he or she is notified of your post via e-mail and will also see it in the mentions view on his or her personal newsfeed.

Add #hashtags to posts with one or more topics. The use of hashtags allows you to categorize your post based on the topics it is about. When you type # within a post, existing hashtags are displayed. You also have the option to create a new hashtag. One of the main values of adding hashtags to your posts and replies is that it enables your post to show up in the newsfeed of other people who are following the tag but may not be following you. This is very helpful when you are asking questions and interested in discovering relevant subject matter experts. As a best practice, don’t add more than three hashtags to a single post.

Share your post with specific teams. By default, your newsfeed posts are visible to everyone in the organization. If you want to have the post be shown only to specific teams, you may want to change the “share with” option above the post to direct the post to a specific team site you’re following or post directly to the site feed within a team site. In these cases, the post will honor the security permissions set for the team site and be shown only to those authorized. You may also want to consider posting to a community site discussion instead of your newsfeed if the topic is one that you think will have long-term value to the community (refer to Table 15-5 for suggested use cases where this might be appropriate).

Attach an image to your newsfeed post. This image is automatically uploaded into the microfeed list within your personal site, which is where your newsfeed is stored and managed.

Add hyperlinks. When you post a link, you have the option of changing the display text rather than showing the full URL in your post to make it easier for people to read. One benefit of this is that it helps you to stay within the 512-character limit per newsfeed post while also improving readability for others. Note that you cannot attach a document to a newsfeed post, but you can insert a link to the document.

Post a link to a video. If you post a link to a video that is stored in SharePoint or YouTube, a video player is displayed and the video can be played directly from the post.

Share a link to a document written in one of the Microsoft Office applications. When links to Office documents are included and the Office Web Apps server is available, you have the option to preview Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents directly within the post.

Indicate agreement or affinity with someone else’s post. When you like a post or reply created by someone else, other people who follow you will see this activity in their newsfeed.

View a list of all of the items that you liked as a special view within your newsfeed. This view is accessed via the “. . .” menu of more options.

View additional actions you can take on your newsfeed with the “. . .” menu. The “. . .” menu on individual posts enables you to perform actions such as marking a post or reply for follow-up. This action creates a task for you on your personal site. The “. . .” menu is also one of the ways that you can select to follow a hashtag that is included in a post. Doing this will make items tagged with this hashtag show up within your newsfeed.

Use the Newsfeed Settings in your profile to set which activities you want to be notified about via e-mail. For example, when someone mentions you in a post, starts to follow you, or replies to a conversation in which you are participating, you can elect to receive an e-mail notification. You can also use these settings to manage what activities you want others to be able to see.

There are two main locations to interact with the SharePoint newsfeed. This chapter has focused primarily on the public newsfeed integrated within the personal site. Newsfeeds can also be included within team sites. SharePoint allows you to interact with both private (team site) site feed and public (Everyone) newsfeeds from within your personal site. Figures 15-10 and 15-11 show an example of a newsfeed post that was initiated from a personal site and published within a private Book Team site.

Figure 15-10 Posting to the Book Team site from a personal site

Figure 15-11 Newsfeed within the Book Team site

The same features and concepts apply when using newsfeeds within a team site as with the public newsfeed, including being able to mention people and use tags in your posts. One major difference is that newsfeed posts targeted at team sites are security trimmed to be visible only to members of the team site. SharePoint includes newsfeed posts for team sites you are following in the main newsfeed view within your personal site so you can follow all of the activities of interest to you in a single location.

Ratings

One of the benefits of social computing is getting richer feedback from others and allowing people to have conversations around a particular document or topic. SharePoint 2010 introduced the concepts of ratings and social tagging. Both of these areas continue to be important considerations in SharePoint 2013. When you socially tag or rate items, these events are shown to others who follow you in their newsfeeds. By interacting with content in your intranet or team sites, you can enhance the value of that content for both you and others.

Ratings can be enabled on a variety of SharePoint list and library types, including documents, blogs, and wikis. By default, ratings are disabled on most list types. For lists and libraries, ratings can be based on either stars (0–5 stars) or likes (Figure 15-12). This is an improvement over SharePoint 2010, where there was a disconnect between rating and using the “I Like It” tag.

Figure 15-12 Enabling ratings on a document library

When star ratings are enabled (Figure 15-13), SharePoint shows you the average of the ratings and the total number of people who have rated the item. The total number is important because it helps to determine how relevant the average rating is. For example, if 50 ratings for an item have an average rating of 4.5 stars, it is considered more relevant than if only one person rated an item with 5 stars. Content can also be sorted and filtered based on its ratings.

Figure 15-13 Star ratings within a document library

When like ratings are enabled, SharePoint shows you the total number of likes (Figure 15-14) for each item.

Figure 15-14 Like ratings within a document library

Social Tagging

Social keyword tagging was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and works similarly in 2013. To add a keyword tag to a document or list item, you click the row for the item and then click the Tags and Notes option in the ribbon (Figure 15-15). When the dialog box appears (Figure 15-16), you can start typing the name for the tag you want to apply. If the tag already exists as an enterprise keyword, you can select it. If not, you have the option of creating a new social keyword tag. Unlike hashtags, social keyword tags can include multiple words or a short phrase. You can use multiple tags by separating them with a semicolon. You can also specify whether the tags you apply should be private. If you mark a tag as Private, it will not be shown to others following you or following the tag.

Figure 15-15 Selecting an item to socially tag

Figure 15-16 Applying a social tag to an item

Providing a Structure for Collaborating

SharePoint supports multiple ways to have structured, collaborative conversations and collaborating to create content. These include

Community portals, sites, and community features

Blogs

Wikis

Collaborative authoring within Microsoft Office documents

Community Portals, Sites, and Community Features

Community sites, discussed earlier, are one of the main areas of social investment for SharePoint 2013. Community sites are a major step forward from the SharePoint discussion lists that existed in prior releases.

A new Community Portal site template is available in SharePoint 2013 (Figure 15-17) that aggregates all SharePoint sites in your environment that have been created using the Community Site template. The community portal provides an easy way to discover and join communities. While it is possible to enable community features in other SharePoint sites, such as a team site, only sites created from the Community Site template are displayed in the community portal.

Figure 15-17 Community Portal

Community Sites

By default, community sites are public, so anyone can join a community, but site owners can change the access permissions to either make the community private or require that join requests be approved before someone can become a member. When you join a community, it automatically shows up in your sites list as a site that you are following. As a member of the community, there are many activities that you can perform. The most typical activities are posting and answering questions. Figure 15-18 shows the default view when you first enter a community of which you are not a member. The discussions with the most recent activity are shown higher in the list. You can also select prebuilt views to sort and filter the list to show only unanswered questions or to see just questions that you have posted.

Figure 15-18 Community recent discussion view

When community sites are established as unique site collections, the owner or moderator has the option of enabling “auto-approval” for permission requests. When this feature is enabled, prospective members can join the community by clicking the “Join this community” button shown inFigure 15-18. When users click the join button, SharePoint automatically moves them from the Visitor to the Members security group for the site collection, surfaces their name and activity status within the community on the members view for the community, and enables them to start earning reputation points within the community. Enabling auto-approval is not available when you create a community site as a sub-site of another site. An advantage of implementing communities as separate site collections is that a site collection is the most scalable model for long-term growth, but other than the auto-approval feature, there are no differences in user experience between community sites implemented as site collections and those implemented as sub-sites. As a best practice, always configure community sites with unique permissions, and do not share the sites with users until you have completed configuration so that they do not appear in the community portal before you are ready to expose the site to new users. In addition, if you are not using an independent site collection for your community site, consider adding the Everyone security group to the Members SharePoint Group for your site so that your entire organization will be able to contribute content and join the community without having to submit an access request (though you can both not enable auto-approval and require users to request access if that better meets the specific needs of your community).

When you start a new discussion (Figure 15-19), you have the option to identify your post as a question. This indicates that you are seeking answers. When members start posting replies to discussion questions, others within the community can reply and like replies posted by others. The person who asked the original question or the moderator of the community site can identify one response as the best reply, and that response will be shown at the top of the discussion (Figure 15-20) as well as in search results.

Figure 15-19 Posting a new question in a community

Figure 15-20 Question with a best reply

Community members can see how active others are within the community from the members list (Figure 15-21).

Figure 15-21 Top community contributors

Community moderators can see additional details and perform additional actions using the links in Community Tools as shown in Figure 15-22.

Figure 15-22 Community Tools Web Part

The links in Community Tools allow moderators to

Manage discussions where they can delete a post or mark a post as featured. Featured discussions are listed at the top of each category view.

Create categories and associate images with new categories.

Create badges in addition to the two default badges: Expert and Professional. Badges created on the Badges screen can be “gifted” to members, essentially overriding the need to earn reputation points to achieve levels.

Assign badges to members based on criteria determined by the moderator or the community as a whole.

Determine reputation settings, including whether or not items can be rated using stars or likes, whether the achievement points system will be enabled and how many points each activity is worth, how many points are required for each level, and whether the achievement level should be displayed as an image or text (see Figure 15-23).

Figure 15-23 Community reputation administration

Review reported posts where they can examine posts that members have tagged using the “Report to moderator” link available in the “. . .” menu for an individual post or reply.

Manage the community settings where they can enter the date the community (not the site) was established and enable auto-approval and/or reporting of offensive content.

What Does “Member” Mean in the Context of a Community Site?

Microsoft has built in some special permissions for community sites and, unfortunately, changed the meaning of the term member in the context of sites built using the Community Site template. Actually, the term member in the context of a community site is probably closer to the generally accepted English definition of this term. The use of the term member in the context of all other types of SharePoint team sites is extremely confusing because it is used to refer to a permission group, not the group of people who are actually members of the team. In the context of a community site, there are actually two completely different types of “members”:

Community Members, the SharePoint security group: Just as for other team sites in SharePoint, when you create a new community site with unique permissions, SharePoint 2013 automatically creates default security groups [Site Name] Owners, [Site Name] Members, [Site Name] Visitors, and the new [Site Name] Moderators. These default groups have Full Control, Contribute, Read, and Moderator permissions, respectively. This is actually different from “regular” team sites, where [Site Name] Members have Edit permissions by default. The primary difference between Contribute and Edit is the ability to create lists and libraries.

Members of the community site (who will be listed in the members view): In the context of the community site, “member” also means someone who has explicitly joined the community using the join button. Until users explicitly join a community, they are not listed in the members view of the community, even if they might otherwise be in the Members security group. So, in the context of the community site, there are community members and people who are in the security group called Members. You must be in the Members security group in order to post to the discussion list, but you won’t be listed in the members view of the community until you have explicitly joined the community (or made a contribution). Yes, it’s confusing, but perhaps this explanation makes it less so.

Blogs

SharePoint 2013 continues to support blogging, and there have been minor updates to the blogging features in this release. Typically, a blog site is created as a sub-site within an individual’s personal site or as a sub-site of a team site. Blogs are a great way for a person or team to share thoughts and best practices with others within the organization—especially when it is a more involved topic that does not lend itself to a quick update via a newsfeed or a discussion post—but it is not as structured as creating a formal document. For example, the executive team may choose to maintain a blog to share thoughts and solicit feedback from others (Figure 15-24).

Figure 15-24 Executive blog

Blog posts can be authored either directly in your Web browser or by using a blogging application such as Microsoft Word. Rich text, tables, pictures, and videos can be included or embedded within the blog post. You also have the ability to link to other pages and upload a file that gets related to the blog post. Categories can be created to group related blog posts together.

People reading the blog post have the ability to rate (stars or likes) and comment on the blog post as well (Figure 15-25). When you post or rate a blog post, people following you see the activity in their newsfeed. Unfortunately, blog posts and comments do not currently support the ability to direct posts with @mentions or assign hashtags.

Figure 15-25 Commenting on and liking a blog post

Wikis

SharePoint 2013 offers in-browser wiki page editing, which takes advantage of many of the new SharePoint enterprise content management and Web content management enhancements in this release. Wikis are great for working together with others to manage pages. The SharePoint Team Site template uses the SharePoint wiki platform for editing pages in the browser. You can also create a dedicated enterprise wiki site for creating documentation or a shared acronym list. Some of the key features of SharePoint wikis include the following:

Wikis offer the ability to insert various objects, including tables, images, links, documents, and videos, and embed code to show content from other sites inline, such as a video from YouTube (Figure 15-26).

Figure 15-26 Editing a wiki post

Wiki pages can be categorized. Categories can be created and managed using the SharePoint Managed Metadata Service to drive consistency across wiki pages (Figure 15-27).

Figure 15-27 Wiki categories

Wiki pages can be rated (stars or likes); the rating activities are displayed in the newsfeed.

Wiki pages leverage a publishing workflow and can be versioned. You can compare changes between versions of the page as well.

Wiki pages can be created or linked to from within existing wiki pages by typing [[. When you enter [[ (two “open” brackets), SharePoint will show a list of existing pages available within the library. You can select an existing page to link to or type a new page name and then type ]] (two “close” brackets) to let SharePoint know that the name of the page is complete.

Collaborative Authoring within Microsoft Office Documents

The Microsoft Office rich clients and Web applications have added additional support for collaborative authoring—cases where multiple people are simultaneously editing the same file. In some organizations, the use of Microsoft Office OneNote for shared note taking and brainstorming has started to replace other forms of social collaboration, including wikis. Figure 15-28 shows an example of team members using OneNote in a Web browser to work together at the same time to add meeting notes. By default, team sites in SharePoint 2013 include a team notebook for sharing meeting notes via OneNote.

Figure 15-28 OneNote shared notebook in a Web browser

Various Microsoft Office clients and their browser-based Web Application Companions (WACs) support the ability for people to work together on editing the same document at the same time. Table 15-6 provides a summary of the applications that support collaborative authoring via the rich desktop client or the WAC.

Table 15-6 Collaborative Authoring Supported in Office 2013