Sharepoint Social – Raising a Glass to Enterprise 2.0

We at Company Net are currently engaged by one of a number of clients the drinks industry to design a global Corporate Portal for them on Sharepoint 2007. After extensive consultation with a wide cross-section of staff over recent weeks, one of the major themes to emerge was the importance of social element of the corporate portal – in particular: 

• allowing staff to use the native Wiki functionality of Sharepoint 2007, to form a structured Knowledge-base;
• providing blogging functionality to share experience, expertise and good practice; and
• MySite functionality to join up staff across the organisation – allowing them to profile themselves in a way which has never been possible before.

We were blown away by the enthusiasm and vision of the staff consulted.  They were quick to realise the benefits of the Sharepoint toolset, and identify areas where they could make use of these to improve communication and information-sharing throughout the business – despite the obvious cultural shift which this brings.

Sharepoint Social Computing

Those cultural considerations are well explored in Richard Dennison’s excellent blog article.  This documents some of the challenges experienced by BT in implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools for BT – and how they overcame them.   

Whilst BT did not use Sharepoint for its project, there are plenty of good news stories about those who have.  Check out  Social Computing with Sharepoint, which sets out the successes of the likes of Electronic Arts and Accenture in their implementations of Enterprise 2.0 functionality using Sharepoint 2007.

It’s no surprise that, in October 2009, Gartner placed Microsoft as Visionaries and Leaders in its Magic Quadrant for the ‘Social Computing’ category:

Gartner Magic Quadrant - Social Computing - October 2009

Gartner’s defines the ‘Social Computing’ category as follows: 

“We view this market as consisting of products that focus on team collaboration, communities and social interaction. The buyers in this market are looking for persistent virtual environments, in which participants can create, organize and share information, as well as interact with each other.”

Looking ahead to Sharepoint 2010, it’s clear that Microsoft are looking to develop the vision further and maintain their position as visionaries.  There’s a great blog article on the “New Social Computing Features” of Sharepoint 2010 on Microsoft UK’s Sharepoint Team’s blog.  One particular area of focus for Sharepoint 2010 has been developing the social potential of the MySite functionality, as well as further enhancing the existing blogging and wiki features.

Twitter: we wos robbed!

News comes today that Sunderland striker Darren Bent has stopped tweeting to concentrate on his football.  It comes after he landed himself in trouble a few months ago for issuing a number of ill-advised tweets, about which other football clubs he would and wouldn’t join.

He’s not the first person to land themselves in trouble for revealing too much about themselves through their Twitter entries.

Witness Please Rob Me, a site which has just launched which tells burglars which houses are likely to be empty – based on information unwittingly provided by Twitter users.  The apparent real objective of the site is to warn people of the potential side effects of inadvertently revealing too much about yourself through your tweets.

Please Rob Me

Perhaps Darren Bent has taken heed of Please Rob Me.  He wouldn’t be the first high-profile British footballer to have his house burgled when he was known to be miles away from home, on a pitch, kicking a ball about.

So, the message from Please Rob Me is – be careful what you Twitter.  You could end up revealing much more than you had intended.  On the other hand, you could do us all a favour and just follow Darren Bent’s example of simply hanging up your Twitter boots.

Why Blog?

Credit to Colin Gilchrist for unearthing this little gem.  The most succinct summary of the rationale for blogging that you’re ever likely to find:

Dog-gone Virtual Pets

Picture the scene if you will – Easter Saturday, a family holiday down to the Lake District.  The sun shining outside the car, its occupants lazily meandering down the A7, through the Scottish Borders, having deliberately shunned the M8/M74 route in favour of a more tranquil journey.  The River Tweed follows a complementary path, with newborn lambs nestling with their mothers along its course.

Mum sits serene in the passenger seat enjoying the views.  Dad sits in the driving seat, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel with quiet contentment, gazing alternately between the road and the scenery.

All is calm in the back seats, the three kids having seen enough of the nature outside the window, all now plugged into their electronic devices inside the car.  The Nintendo DS is the gadget of choice – with 2 units shared between 3 children to encourage sharing and filial respect.  Nintendogs and Littlest Pets are the games of choice – both very gentle and designed to foster responsibility within a playful environment of care and nurture (or so says Nintendo).  For those of you not familiar, these games allow you to  play with, train, walk and wash your virtual pets.

Virtual Pets

But the calm doesn’t last for long.  Middle child soon pipes up: “Hey, who’s been taking my dogs for a walk!??”

Not to be outdone, eldest child soon pitches in, the anger growing as the realisation begins to break on him: “That’s nothing, some of my dogs have been deleted!!”

Youngest child is initially conspicuous by her silence.  But it doesn’t last for long, the peace disturbed by volleys of accusation and counter-accusation flying backwards and forwards between the occupants of the rear seats of the car.

Everyone knows what’s coming next:  some serious parental intervention. 

“Enough!!” growls Dad, with a stern glance in his rear-view mirror, panning across the visages of all three of the backseat passengers.  “Can’t you all save your squabbling for real things which really matter?!  I can’t believe you’re all arguing over something as silly as a bunch of imaginary pets made out of nothing more than pixels!”

Peace is restored giving Dad some space to consider his comments. 

Fingers drumming on the steering wheel, and eyes gazing alternately from road to scenery, it was only when I reflected on what I had said that I realised how wrong I had been. 

These may not be real pets in any physical sense, but my children have invested hours of their time, and bundles of their energy in nurturing, developing and caring for these onscreen animals.  The animals may only be made from pixels, but they have captivated the imaginations of my children and countless thousands of others.  And these affections, feelings and emotions are very, very real.

As my attention turned back to the road, chastising myself for my hasty judgement, it occurred to me that games such as these (and the likes of the Tamagotchi before it) are increasingly representative of the electronic and virtual environments into which our children are growing up.   We adults now think nothing of sitting in front of screens, investing time, energy and emotions in social networking or writing blogs.   These are very real things for us.  Why should it be any different for our children?