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Chapter 1: Social Computing
aspects of a social computing solution will increase the speed at which an organization can accomplish
tasks. An example of this might be something as simple as using an RSS feed to pull down informa-
tion about company news only when an employees is ready to read it. This improved communication
usually works well with internal PR/PA groups and resonates well with upper management looking to
streamline its corporate communications divisions.
Strategies for building a good communications plan using social computing techniques frequently plan to
implement technologies such as tagging, rating, and improved search. This can hold true with people or
documents from a social computing view as the application centers around people and the content they
create. This is a fundamental difference from traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems
that are centered on documents. SharePoint’s key is the ability to provide both of these capabilities and
allow the customer to pick what is most important to him or her: documents, people, or both. SharePoint
doesn’t force its users to exclude one way of doing something just because it is using another. The most
frequently cited example of this combined approach in SharePoint is focused on being able to search for
an employee who is hard to find today or finding out who has edited a document. Additional business
value can be discovered as users solve the problems they have today with actual Web 2.0 concepts, not
just sample implementations.
Building Collaboration
Building collaboration is the other major aspect of enterprise social computing. Enhancing collaboration
has been a central tenet of SharePoint ever since its inception as a product. For users of SharePoint 2003,
this could be seen with the early value of having a Team Site in SharePoint, allowing a team to have
a single point for work. Collaboration and communication are closely tied together and can increase
value when used together. For instance, a SharePoint 2007 Team Site might have a set of announce-
ments for the team. By using RSS feeds, SharePoint allows team members to read the announcement
during their day without filling their email system and causing fragmentation in their work environ-
ment. Some of the key technologies that are used for building a more collaborative environment tend to
include blogs, wikis, and discussion boards. The real value is the ability for multiple people to provide
feedback to each other and work on the same set of information without waiting for a strict workflow
process.
For example, take an internal instructional document for a software company’s product that is designed
to help the company’s software engineers work more effectively. In general, there are many engineers
working on a single document. Because this is a single document, there are a number of options that
can be considered to enhance the collaboration experience. First and most obvious, the document can be
stored in a SharePoint library. This library could require version control and enforce document checkout
any time the document is going to be worked on. By checking out the document, the user is preventing
other people from adding information directly to the document while it is in use, which could cause
one person’s changes to be overwritten. Unfortunately, this process of only allowing a single user at a
timedoesslowdowntheoverallprogressofwork.Tosharethedocument,itcouldbeemailedtoeach
person on a routing list for review, but this would require high amounts of duplication and disk space
while minimizing the ability to collaborate quickly with other members. In this example case, a better
collaboration tool such as a wiki could allow a secure, version-controlled, and collaborative environment
for each of the users to work in. This would provide the most up-to-date living document and take some
of the burden or extra work off the employees responsible for these documents. Learn more about wikis
in the enterprise in chapter 4.
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