Microsoft’s heavy hitting web application platform, SharePoint has taken business communities by storm and continues to dominate the market. Since its release in 2001, SharePoint has evolved as a sort of jack-of-all-trades in the industry, helping businesses with document and content management issues as well as clearing out long standing communication challenges common before the existence of such a powerful platform. SharePoint has made business collaboration beyond easy, but does it have the capacity to help employees connect on a social level? It sure does.
There is no denying the world has been taken by storm by social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These amazingly successful sites have been putting people in touch and connecting folks with like interests globally for years now, but does this sort of social networking have a place in business communities? Absolutely.
Strengthening relationships and making personal connections in the workplace helps push business results; it’s why the last decade has seen an increase in team building activities – people tend to work better when they feel they belong to a bigger community, contributing to common goals. The trouble is, how do you build these relationships when your company houses five thousand employees or the nature of your business content is too sensitive to risk being put on a third party social networking site? What you do is use SharePoint.
SharePoint has a plethora of built in functionality for social networking. HR training and good governance are a must but outside that getting started is simple and the great thing about SharePoint’s social networking capabilities is that it uses skill sets that most people already possess. SharePoint has integrated feeds like Facebook, personal profile pages like LinkedIn and status messages with a Twitter format feel. These easy to use features are important when onboarding employees to an internal social networking experience because the bottom line is social networking only works if most everyone can and will use it.
Some features to look forward to in your SharePoint social networking experience:
My Site Profile – Each SharePoint user gets their own My Site page to tell a little about themselves, their work, skills, and current projects.
My Newsfeed – From your site you can create status messages to keep colleagues updated.
Tag and Like Profile Pages – Each user has the capability to tag and like other pages, which are then displayed in a cloud on your site and in colleagues activity feeds.
Blog – SharePoint provides rich blogging functionality for both internal and external posts.
More of a visual learner? Check out this video on how you can make SharePoint’s social networking capabilities work for you http://bit.ly/uLrcgE
Is your SharePoint social networking experience missing something? Contact us here at V51 Consulting and see what a SharePoint Architect can do for you.
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