SharePoint Server 2010 introduces many new features to support social networking. In the first part of this three-part article, I look at the major requirements for social networking and introduce the User Profile Service, which provides one of the foundations for such networking. In the second article I’ll discuss how to populate the User Profile through synchronization with LDAP-compliant directories, and in the third article I’ll describe the major features that are used to better exploit a major information asset of any organization—its people. Note that the social networking features described in these articles are available only with a SharePoint Server 2010 installation and aren’t available in a SharePoint Foundation 2010–only deployment.
Social Networking Requirements
Social networking is all about people. It’s about finding the right people and the best information sources to use to deliver business goals. Often, finding the right people is achieved through a journey of discovery (or some might say a journey of frustration!) that leverages the social connections that exist between people and the skills and expertise they possess. A common challenge in large organizations is that the connections between people are often tacit (i.e., not written down and known only inside the heads of individuals); no definitive source exists for registering the skills that people have or those that they develop as they progress through their careers.
SharePoint Server 2010 was designed with the social side of information sharing in mind. It provides many features that can be used to find the right people to do the right job by treating people as a significant intellectual asset and placing them at the center of any collaboration. Finding information about people, including who they know and the skills they possess, is usually just a click away. I say “usually” because building such a social network that ultimately delivers value doesn’t just happen by merely installing SharePoint. It requires the buy-in of everyone—from executive support, to IT, to end users—such that the full wealth of the organization can be leveraged. To generate the greatest value, a network’s scope must be across an entire organization and be viewed as a social networking hub. Half-hearted deployments typically result in frustrated users who don’t see the value in using the system.
SharePoint architects and administrators therefore need to think about how information about people will be captured and how this information will be kept up-to-date so that it’s vibrant and accurately reflects the current intellectual wealth of the organization. If information is correctly gathered and managed, then the organization as a whole benefits because SharePoint takes a people-centric approach, offering linkages between other people and resources. SharePoint helps you understand the social context between you and other people who contribute to your organization’s collateral, which can help you build stronger relationships—sometimes with others who you might not have even known existed before you embarked on your information-gathering task.
Importance of the User Profile
Leveraging people as information assets requires a flexible central store that can hold data about the people in an organization. The data held in such a store needs to be gathered from multiple sources, because it’s common for different types of information about people to be held in special-purpose repositories. For example, project information about projects that people worked on might be held in a different database than organizational information, and people skills and interests might exist only inside the heads of individuals.
The User Profile is at the heart of SharePoint Server 2010’s social networking features and is where the vast majority of information about people is stored. The User Profile Service application, managed through SharePoint Central Administration, controls many people-centric features, such as maintenance of entries in the User Profile, synchronization of the profile with other repositories, and My Site settings (which I’ll discuss in the last article in this series). Figure 1 shows the management page of the User Profile Service. Note that some options are also displayed to manage organization profiles; however, I don’t discuss this feature because it isn’t fully implemented in SharePoint 2010.
Figure 1: User Profile Service management
When a User Profile Service application is initially provisioned, three main SQL Server databases are created to hold people and social information:
- ProfileDB—Holds user and organization profile information
- SocialDB—Stores social tags and notes that are created by users against SharePoint collateral; each tag and note is related to an entry in the User Profile so that we know which user created the tag or note
- SyncDB—Holds configuration and staging information for synchronizing profile data from external sources such as Active Directory (AD)
You can think of the User Profile as a special-purpose SharePoint list that acts as a directory for people. Its contents can be fuelled from multiple sources, such as AD, other LDAP-compliant sources, and Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS), through synchronization. Developers can also use many techniques to allow profile updates from other applications, and end users can be authorized to update their own directory entries from their My Site. (A common misconception is that the User Profile is required or involved when authorizing access to a SharePoint site. However, no requirement exists to implement the profile in authorizing access to SharePoint content.)