Translating Social Media Into SharePoint
In prepping for my presentation at SharePoint Saturday Boston this week, I came across a couple great articles outlining the business value of social media in the enterprise, which led to a great discussion this afternoon with my boss about online tools versus enterprise usefulness. To paraphrase Garry, he stated that social media was envisioned for the individual (and ad revenue), but business owners struggle to understand how to make them useful in the enterprise. They can see the inherent value, but they struggle with harnessing these features.
Part of what I am going to talk about Saturday is mapping these social media tools to what is available in SharePoint (2003, 2007, and 2010 versions), citing part of Dion Hinchcliffe’s article “Ten Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Technologies to Watch.”
For example, his first item is “Community management tools.” Well, this maps over to SharePoint as tagging, discussion forums, feedback and ratings, routing, bookmarking, blogging, sharing and tracking.
My point is, adding social media capability to SharePoint does not necessarily mean complex integrations of third party software. The pieces are there – the hard part is figuring out:
- which features to use
- what metadata and taxonomy are needed to enable these features AND help you meet all enterprise security, compliance, and intellectual property asset management guidelines
- how you’ll manage the metadata and taxonomy going forward
Looking forward to hearing from the audience on the topic. See you there.
