Sep 11, 2014

SharePoint 2013 takes people of their isolated workspaces and gives them the ability and tools to collaborate with other people in the organisation such as their work colleagues, peers, and executives. In this article, I will talk about various ways of connecting people in SharePoint. There are many features in SharePoint 2013 that helps making social computing and collaboration easier. SharePoint 2013 has also introduced new capabilities that allow enterprise users to share and interact with other people within the organisation. SharePoint offers a “My site solution.” The SharePoint My Site allows users to create a “personal portal” in the corporate SharePoint environment. The My Site is also a place for users to share personal and professional interests and expertise and, with privacy settings, decide to whom most of this information will be shared. In SharePoint 2013, the My Site user interface has been totally redesigned to provide a more intuitive user experience, predominantly by virtue of the simplified and unified navigation. My Sites in SharePoint 2013 has also been enhanced to contain the new microblogging and news feeds features.

Microblogging features in SharePoint 2013 enable users to swiftly and easily post information to a central location while enabling other users to create a public dialogue by replying with comments and “likes”. SharePoint 2013 has also introduced a site template known as community sites. Community Sites provide a user forum to classify and encourage discussions within an extensive group of people in an enterprise. Community Sites provide a location for communication and the sharing of information about expertise and interests between users who want to share their expertise and also utilise the expertise of other people in the organisation and to find people with common interests.

There are four main components in a community site:

1. Discussions: members can post an opinion or question to start a new discussion. Other members can reply to and like the post.
2. Categories: members can create categories to organise their discussions.
3. Badges and Reputation: moderators can assign badges to members to indicate their status within the community, e.g. Subject matter expert.
4. Members: a list of all members, including their badges and reputation earned, is held on the community site.

So if you’re using SharePoint 2013, I would encourage you to take advantage of these great features which allow you to share knowledge, ideas and expertise amongst your colleagues.