Enabling and managing social networks (for business use) with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

[Update 01/24/2008: The white paper has finally been published at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262436.aspx.] 

While the Microsoft / Facebook expanded partnership announcement made earlier today doesn't have anything to do with SharePoint, the publicity it generated will likely get a lot more people to start thinking or asking about the value of social networking capabilities within an enterprise and between a company and its business partners as well as its customers. Eric Charran (Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services), Dino Dato-on (SharePoint Ranger), and Greg Lang (Program Manager for Microsoft Enterprise Services Communities Tools and Infrastructure) have written a soon to be published white paper that addresses the topic of the importance of social networking in an organization and how to properly implement MOSS 2007 as a social networking solution. Excerpted below are key portions of the white paper, which I hope will get you to think about MOSS 2007 as your default option for enabling and managing social networks for business use.

Overview of Social Networking

The concept of social networking has recently experienced a great deal of visibility as a means to increase the productivity of information workers and organization members. Social networking as a concept involves the ability for a technology platform to provide enhanced information and interaction capabilities with regard to people and resources. Within an organization, the goal of a technology platform providing social networking is to enhance communication, collaboration and bring about productivity increases regarding day to day activities and projects.

Information workers can leverage existing organizational social relationships in order to quickly find resources and colleagues to assist in projects, help with identifying and unblocking daily work issues as well as provide a deeper understanding of team structures and organizational relationships. The application of social networking within professional organizations is designed to help members quickly navigate team structures and groups in order to achieve results.

Comprehension of the value that social networking systems provide to organizations can be provided by the review of some empirical studies that focus on productivity enhancements before and after implementation.

Social networking systems in the enterprise (commonly referred to as “Communities of Practice”) can help increase productivity and efficiency. Take for instance this finding from a study performed by Lesser and Storck in 2001: "Communities appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries. In addition, the community concept is acknowledged to be a means of developing and maintaining long-term organizational memory. These outcomes are an important, yet often unrecognized, supplement to the value that individual members of a community obtain in the form of enriched learning and higher motivation to apply what they learn."

Social networking also assists in the extinction of information and capability silos by identifying subject matter experts and resources. Information workers seeking these resources can use a social networking technology platform discover individuals and teams that are related to their initiative or effort. This process, supported by the right technology circumvents a traditionally elongated and arduous discovery and resource-seeking process.

Office SharePoint Server as a Social Networking Solution

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds a significant social networking context to its existing collaboration and communication features and capabilities. By providing a framework for the establishment of user profiles and the ability to understand the organizational hierarchy between these profiles, Office SharePoint Server can easily connect information workers and organization members together.

Using the concept of individual, customizable user profiles, Office SharePoint Server allows users to publish their own personal and team information to the organization. Combined with information from organizational directory services such as Active Directory or other Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), Office SharePoint Server builds a foundational organizational hierarchy that is used to present workgroup and colleague information to organization members. This rapid method of presenting friends and colleagues in an automated fashion provides quick access for information workers to teams and extended resources. Office SharePoint Server logically extends existing organizational directory services, combined with additional information sources to knit together a team-based view of organizational relationships and presents them to the user.

Office SharePoint Server Social Networking Features

Through the use of Office SharePoint Server as a collaboration platform, organizations can benefit from the productivity and communication enhancements exposed by social networking features. SharePoint exposes social networking to information workers and organization members through the use of colleagues. Colleagues are a list of friends, team members and co-workers that are related to a specific person through the establishment of a user profile. Colleagues are presented to users through a user's personal site (My Site) and are built using foundational elements that are established when Office SharePoint Portal Server is implemented within the organization.

Based on the organization's implementation of products including Active Directory, Exchange Server, Live Communications Server 2005 or Office Communications Server 2007, Office SharePoint Server will mine this information at the individual user level to determine other team members, organizational managers and direct reports and virtual team members that should appear on an individual's colleagues list. The colleagues list, presented through web parts on an individual’s personal profile page of their My Site will list these related individuals and provide contact, presence and organizational information to visitors.

Through the use of colleagues, organization members can find subject matter experts, key contacts and business relationship owners in the enterprise and gain instant access to the methods of communication with those personnel. This aspect of social networking allows for increased lines of communications, quick decision making and an optimization of human resources.

Managing Heterogeneous Social Networking Source Information

While the organizational hierarchy import from an authoritative directory store (such as Active Directory) is how Office SharePoint Server builds its initial foundation for social networking, organizations often have supplementary sources of information that can be combined to provide increased or enriched personal profile information. Thus, when users are looking for colleagues, rich information from secondary human resource information systems or personnel databases can be combined with Active Directory to provide a deeper "picture" of the colleague. In many cases, Active Directory contains a minimum amount of information about personal details, contact and address information and reporting relationships. Other human resource information systems contain a wealth of rich publicly accessible personnel data that would assist the social networking presentation features of Office SharePoint Server.

The goal for many organizations is to optimize their social networking experience by combining heterogeneous personnel information into an Office SharePoint Server user profile. By combining this information and modifying user profile properties, organizations can enrich the presentation of team and colleague information to organization members. In order to accomplish this goal, organizations require a carefully planned strategy when combining multiple sources of personnel information to provide a rich user profile for social networking using SharePoint Products and Technologies.

The following sections outline the features, patterns and practices involved with implementing social networking with Office SharePoint Server in an organization. These strategies will assist administrators in offering a full-fidelity social networking experience to organization members that build on solid heterogeneous directory and personnel data management. By selecting and implementing a strategy for enriched user profile creation, Office SharePoint Server can present relevant colleague, organizational hierarchy and team information to information workers.

Social Networking in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

The following sections briefly describe the elements of social networking in Office SharePoint Server. These features allow organizations to implement social networking and leverage the aforementioned benefits of increase productivity and efficiency. A critical component to the social networking features is the establishment of a populated user profile object. The population of the user profile by supplying its fields with authoritative personnel data from external sources provides a rudimentary framework that Office SharePoint Server builds to establish social networking relationships.

Social Networking Features

The following feature list outlines the capabilities that are provided to organization members in the context of social networking.

1. My Sites

My Sites are individualized sites created for each user profile that contains personnel information about the user as well as personal and public views of information, documents and other content. The My Site can contain personal and targeted blogs, wikis, lists and web parts displaying colleagues and other profile information. The My Site allows users to present information about their skills, individuals they know as well as other social information to visitors.

My Site Public Profile:

My Site Private View:

2. Colleagues Web Part

The colleagues web part allows users to present their mined and compiled colleagues to visitors. The colleagues list is a presentation of other organization members that the specified user works closely with in terms of organizational structure, interaction (i.e., email conversations and instant messaging contact lists) and group/site memberships. SharePoint can make recommendations regarding a colleague based on commonality of interactivity with these small groups, but users can also manually add and remove colleagues.

3. Colleague Tracker Web Part

The colleague tracker web part allows organization members to privately view their list of compiled colleagues and to modify their views and inclusion in their colleagues list. The colleague tracker web part allows for the presentation of recommended colleagues and allows the user to modify colleague tracking by profile information. For example, users can modify the colleague tracker to present updated colleagues when anniversaries, profile properties, authored documents and blogs change. Additionally, scoping the presentation can occur when users choose to view colleagues specifically for the user’s workgroup or organization-wide.

4. SharePoint Sites, Links, and Membership Web Parts

These web parts provide the ability for users to view their own Office SharePoint Server site, group and mail list memberships and links as well as those that they have in common with others. Additionally, visitors can view a user’s memberships, Office SharePoint Server Sites and distribution group memberships.

5. In Common With Web Part

Office SharePoint Server provides a summary view of information relating to the memberships, organizational managers and colleagues that a visitor has in common with the owner of a My Site.

6. Presence Information

When coupled with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information indicating online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information is displayed whenever user information is presented (i.e., colleagues and colleague tracker web parts, etc.).

7. People Search

Office SharePoint Server supports the discovery of team members, colleagues and other individuals by exposing a search interface in which information workers can search on the organization’s personnel. Results are returned to users and are presented in terms of social distance and relevance for grouping. The search can further be refined by user profile attributes including job title and alternatively be viewed based on search term relevance.

People Search on the term “Contractor” displayed by social distance:

8. People Search By User Profile Property

In addition to the various methods organization members can search on individuals using the people search capability, user profile properties displayed on the public profile property page of information worker’s My Site can automatically conduct a people search for individuals with the same property and value grouped by social distance. For example, individuals with a specific interest can select by clicking the interest from their own My Site profile and find others with a similar interest.

People Search initiated from the public profile page for Jesse Merriam for the term “Photography” displayed by social distance:

Social Networking Components

While the user profile population is critical, there are various other hierarchical components that build on each other in order to present the social networking features in Office SharePoint Server to users. The components enumerated below are fundamental in the role that Office SharePoint Server plays as a foundational element for social networking in an organization. These native components assist in assembling a social networking “picture” of personnel information and relationships based on data from heterogeneous sources and mined interactions.

1. User Profile

The user profile is a foundational component that collects and stores data regarding users of an Office SharePoint Server implementation. The profile contains a set of default fields that are extensible by administrators and customizable for organizations. The fields can be sourced from a variety of personnel information within an organization directly and combined to form a holistic view of users. As depicted in the figure below, data sources that populate user profiles can originate from Active Directory as well as an organization’s Human Resource Information System (HRIS) via the Business Data Catalog (BDC). By combining this information, enriched data regarding an individual’s skills, area of expertise, title, job description, etc. can be exposed through Office SharePoint Server’s social networking features.

Example Data Sources of an Office SharePoint Server User Profile:

While the scope and full description of the user profile object are beyond the scope of this documentation, it is important to understand that consistency and accuracy of the user profile information (and ostensibly the accuracy of presentation of this data in social networking functions) is important. The strategies discussed in this document will assist administrators in organizations to craft an information architecture that eliminates conflicting user profile information from disparate data sources.

The user profile is the core foundational object that enables Office SharePoint Server to accurately serve as a social networking solution. The user profile is used to construct an organizational hierarchy and eventually colleagues for users.

2. Organizational Hierarchy

The organizational hierarchy is a critical construct that allows Office SharePoint Server to begin the establishment of colleagues for users. The organizational hierarchy is built directly from fields within the user profile object for each user.

It is of vital importance that the organizational hierarchy is reviewed and accepted by the organization as it is one of the critical foundational elements of Office SharePoint Server’s social networking capabilities. If the organizational hierarchy is not accurate, all further mining and relationships between colleagues can be adversely affected. The best way to ensure that the hierarchy is accurate is to validate the information supplied to the user profile and resolve any differences and inaccuracies between the data sources that feed the profile.

The information in the user profile is used to tie together individuals to managers and peers. Once the hierarchy is established, it can be displayed on user’s My Site as well as used in the analysis to create a list of colleagues. For this reason, it is important to implement an information architecture that provides the user profile with the most accurate information for personnel, teams, colleagues and membership information.

3. Colleagues

Colleagues represent a core underpinning of the social networking experience. By enumerating colleagues and displaying them on user’s My Site and profile information through various web parts, organization members can easily view and connect with individuals that hold relationships to specific teams, initiatives and interests.

Colleagues are built on the information constructed from the organizational hierarchy. Thus, immediate peers, managers and direct reports are included in a specific user’s list of colleagues. They are also further enumerated by a mining process. Office SharePoint Server analyzes interactions of individual users by mining instant messaging contacts and Microsoft Office 2007. SharePoint communicates with the Office 2007 clients (i.e. Outlook, Communicator, etc.) using an ActiveX control whenever a user is added as a member of another user’s colleague and has consented through his/her My Site. .

The following figure outlines the process by which colleagues are constructed and presented in Office SharePoint Server. The organizational hierarchy is depicted as a foundational element that is coupled with contact information mining. Web parts on the user’s My Site and public profile allow for the presentation of colleague information in the context of relation to the specified user as well as an interface for managing colleague mining suggestions and manually adding and removing colleagues.

Hierarchical Structure of Colleague Formation and Presentation:

Accuracy of source information that feeds the user profile is critical to correct colleague presentation. As depicted above, if user profile information is inaccurate (either being fed from Active Directory, or an alternative BDC source), the organizational hierarchy will reflect these same inaccuracies. Thus, colleague formation and presentation will be similarly affected and present seemingly incomplete or incorrect results.

Planning for the implementation of profiles as part of the Office SharePoint Server implementation process involves a long and careful consideration of the information sources of user profiles, authentication privileges and rights for user profile modifications as well as My Site management and social networking feature configuration. See the following guide for additional information and tools on planning for people and profiles.

See the Plan for people and user profiles guide, part of the Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007 documentation.

Conclusion

As a social networking platform, Office SharePoint Server provides an easy to implement and administer method for organizations to begin to leverage the benefits of social networking. Administrative staff needs to understand the strategies for coalescing heterogeneous personnel data into the Office SharePoint Server user profile object to ensure that the social networking associations between organizational members are accurate.

Use the BDC or external data source for non-core User Profile fields that require consistency when creating Social Networking features

The Business Data Catalog can easily supplement custom or non-core User Profile fields. These fields can be custom fields that are added to the user profile by administrators in response to demands by the organization to store additional, business-specific information about users. These fields are not used or leveraged in social networking connections within Office SharePoint Server. However, the same strategy should apply to these fields as well. The fewer sources custom or non-core fields have, the easier it is to manage the information architecture surrounding these fields to present a consistent picture of heterogeneous data within the user profile.

Preserve core User Profile fields to originate from the same data source (preferably AD)

Conversely, to aid in the establishment of a reliable and consistent social networking foundation, single-sourcing the user profile information from an authoritative data source (i.e., Active Directory) is preferred. Active Directory represents a widely implemented store of personnel and account information that Office SharePoint Server integrates with natively. Thus, as a store for multiple sources of identify information, it presents an expansive method of coalescing heterogeneous personnel data sources into a true authoritative store of information that can be used to populate the Office SharePoint Server user profile.

As organizations invest in various software packages to be the authoritative information store for various aspects of personnel information, it is important to design an information architecture and technical solution around the inclusion of this data into Office SharePoint Server as part of a user's profile. As such, a strategy is required to ensure that data from these sources don't conflict, overlap and cause inconsistencies in the social mining involved in creating colleague matches.

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