SharePoint 2010 My Site

Hi, in my previous blog post I talked about some of the new social features of SharePoint 2010. The place to be for being social in SharePoint 2010 is the My Site. In comparison with SharePoint 2007 the My Site has been greatly improved. I want to focus in this post on some of the new features.

The My Site is divided into three sections:

• My Profile
• My Content
• My Newsfeed

My Profile

Overview
In my previous post I mentioned the note board. It can be used to leave messages for your colleagues. This works great in combination with the ‘Ask Me About’ section. For instance: you visit the My Site of a colleague and you see that he or she knows something about InfoPath 2010. You can click on the subject and the following screen appears:

You can immediately type and leave a message about InfoPath 2010. The colleague will get an e-mail message and can now easily contact you. This is a great way to connect with people and share information.

My previous post also included the organization chart. This is shown in HTML view on the My Profile page of the My Site. You can see a quick overview of the manager and colleagues.

Tags and notes

You get an overview of the tags and notes you created in SharePoint. By clicking on for example the tag ‘Functioneel ontwerp’ you can see all the activities (the tagged content) of that tag. You can choose to make the tag private so other colleagues can’t see your tag or even delete it. By clicking on the ‘View Related Activities’ link the following screen appears:

All the tags used by yourself and colleagues of the selected content (in this case ‘Standaard template functioneel Ontwerl SharePoint versie 1.0′) are shown. If you click on ‘Go to Tag Profile for..’ the following screen will appear:

This is the tag profile page. This page exists for every tag and note created in SharePoint. It shows an overview of all the activities of this tag. You can leave messages for colleagues, again really useful for getting in touch with the right people. Do you want this tag to be used in your ‘Ask Me About’ section? Just click on ‘Add to “Ask Me About” in My Profile’. Can life get any easier? But this does not end here! Do you want to follow all the activities in your newsfeed? Or view all the colleagues following the same tag? Just click on the link and SharePoint does all the work.

My Content

This part of the My Site is the same as SharePoint 2007 but why not combine it with SharePoint Workspace? Move your shared and personal files to you’re My Site and synchronize it with SharePoint Workspace. Work from home and when you arrive in the morning at the office all the files are automatically synchronized with the My Site and the most recent version can be available for your colleagues.

My Newsfeed

Also entirely new is My Newsfeed. All the activities (you can change these in your profile settings) of colleagues, added in the colleagues section, are being shown. A great way to see what your colleagues are doing and maybe get in touch to talk about a common interest.

I really enjoy these new features of the My Site and hopefully a lot of customers will embrace it.