This blog posting applies to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
MOSS provides some very powerful features to enable the new buzzword "social networking." Discussions about these can be found pretty easily, and I give an overview of some tools near the end of this posting. But specifics about how some of the details work has been devilishly hard to find... until now. Through discussions with various people in-the-know, I've been able to assemble answers to common questions around People Search and MySite web parts.
By default, the results on the People Search page are ordered by Social Distance. What the heck is that? It's an ordering of results based on colleague relationships. Here's how it's computed:
By default, 10 results appear per page, so this groups people in batches of 30. If you customized the People Search results page to show 25 results per page, this would group people in batches of 75.
There are potentially some quirks with this algorithm that was designed to give the best value in a lightweight manner. Your colleagues will appear at the top of the list on page 1, but if you have lots of colleagues, more of them might appear on page 4. This is because the colleague grouping takes place on the client, starting with a relevance ranking. So if some of your colleagues are relevance-ranked after 3 pages worth of results, these will be grouped once you get to the next set of 3 pages (page 4, page 7, etc). Based on relevance, these people should be less relevant to your query.
The People Search results page allows you to toggle the results ordering to only Relevance, ignoring the Social Distance grouping.
Relevance ranking in people search is the same as that used in regular search across lists and documents. I'm told that the ranking algorithm MOSS uses in all cases is BM25F.
Conceptually, a user's profile is treated as a document about that person with their name as the title. At a basic level, the more search query terms that appear in the person's profile, the more relevant the result. Matches against a few special fields (e.g. name, alias) are returned in the high confidence webpart.
Note that the names of discussion lists that a user belongs to are included in that user's profile information. This means that a people search for "rock climbers" should return all of the people who are members of a distribution list named "Rock Climbers at Contoso" as well as anyone who has the phrase "rock climbers" in their profile information, such as in their "About Me" field.
Here's where the real value of social distance and other meaningful relationships is computed.
A list of your colleagues is stored in the profile database. During a profile import, this list is initially populated with a set of "immediate colleagues" that are computed from your profile properties: manager, peers and direct reports. This way, when you first look at your Colleagues web part, it's not blank.
Then, from an editing page on your Profile, you can edit your colleagues list to add & remove specific people, and to group them and set their visibility to other people. Also from here, you can ask SharePoint to suggest other colleagues, and these suggestions are collected from several places.
My Microsoft badge photo, 1999!
From your My Site page (or your Profile page, which is available even if My Sites are turned off), click Colleagues to edit your colleague list.
Colleagues from these sources are collected and the top 20 or so are displayed as suggestions when you click "Add Colleague" on your colleague editing page. It's not fruitful to pursue a more detailed understanding of this calculation, because the recommendation for improving the "quality" of colleagues found is the same: people associated with items you access more often are more likely to be suggested as your colleagues. If you don't like the suggestions, you can remove individuals from the suggestion list one by one or all at once from this page, then get a new list of suggestions.
Whoa! Is SharePoint looking at my email? I don't want that, how do I prevent it?
First, SharePoint's not looking at your emails. It gets information about who you sent emails to by asking Outlook for that information. Second, it will never do this without asking your permission. You can always say no:
If you say Yes, then SharePoint will assemble a list of suggested colleagues for you, and you can accept or reject these suggestions. But even if you say No, you can still edit your colleagues to search for and add new people, and to set the privacy of who should see that they are your colleague (Everyone, My Colleagues, My Workgroup, My Manager and Only Me):
Why did we go through all this trouble to try and figure out who your colleagues are? Social Networking, baby! We spent a good bit of time on the inputs and the outputs of this to make it a really useful function, instead of just paying lip service to it.
The inputs are the information about who your colleagues really are. A simple option would have been to just provide a place for you to register your colleagues, and not go through all this supposedly intelligent guesswork. But that would have made it almost useless, because most people are just not going to take the time to populate this list, and even fewer will maintain it as their colleagues change over time, which is natural.
SharePoint uses the information already embedded in your company's infrastructure and the changing data you deal with on a daily basis to help you connect with the right people.
Sounds like market-speak, but that's really the goal and I think it does an amazing job.
The outputs are the tools that SharePoint can provide based on this colleague information. Consider some of these details:
These are some of the tools that MOSS provides for Social Networking; I've highlighted the ones that use profile data and the powerful "colleague" pattern to show meaningful relationships among people. For a better introduction to the full set, see the product team's Enabling and Managing Social Networks for Business use with MOSS.