Toronto SPUG

Never a dull moment in the SharePoint community. I was sitting over at the Axceler table in the exhibit hall of the SharePoint Summit Toronto 2011 event, minding my own business, when I am approached by Richard Harbridge (known as ShareBieber in some circles) with an invitation to speak at the Toronto SharePoint User Group community event that evening. No slides, 10 minutes max, and I can pick my topic. No problem. Would love to do it.

As usual, it turned out to be a great event. I selected the topic “Why you should care about social computing in SharePoint 2010” and outlined three reasons why attendees should consider rolling out the social features in 2010:

1. Social layers on enterprise applications.
   Social features are becoming integrated into all of our enterprise applications, sometimes even allowing for data sharing and collaboration across applications. Teams and individuals can develop efficiencies in work processes by adopting many of these tools. I shared an example of social CRM as one way that these capabilities are extending important business systems.
2. Changing social informatics.
   For those who think social computing is a fad or a distraction, they need to re-look at the features and try to understand that the fundamentals of how we operate are changing, evolving. I used as an example the younger generation and how its not just a productivity tool, but how the next wave of employees communicates and works. Social informatics is the study of the way that people work and communicate, and how we work has changed dramatically even in the last 10 years.
3. It’s all about search.
   When it comes right down to it, social computing is just another way to surface information in the organization. Social features extend your taxonomy, adding a folksonomy and allowing the people who understand the content – and its relationship to other seemingly unconnected content – to improve the search process through tagging, ratings, associations, and activity.

Great dialog, good questions from the audience, and some entertaining demo failures made this a memorable evening – followed by a great dinner with many from the group. Thanks to Veronique Palmer, Tony Lanni, Richard Harbridge, Owen Allen, Coskun Cavusoglu, and Eli Robillard for a fun evening!