Chapter 9. Social Architecture

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Setting up a tag cloud and navigating to the Term Store

• Disabling social features for a user

• Deleting a note associated with a page

• Viewing an Activity feed

• Setting up and compiling an audience

• Creating a synchronization connection

• Changing import/export for user profiles

• Adding a user subtype for user profile

• Creating a new user profile property

Introduction

SharePoint 2010 has been architected to be socially functional, which allows people to collaborate and utilize socialization components similar to Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites.

The business proposition of this functionality being that the information in the organization is uncovered faster and shared quickly. Components, such as rating an item, are automatically shared by users, and the value of that item is decided by the user base.

The value is determined by increased participation in deciding which information in the SharePoint system is relevant. Better information results in better decision making, which has a positive effect on the return on investment. Elements of the SharePoint social experience can be categorized as:

• Profile and context: The profile part defines the elements that make up a user. Simple things such as birthday, work anniversary day, interests, skills, and phone number.

  The second part, the context part, defines the location of the user and...

Setting up a tag cloud and navigating to the Term Store

Social tagging is a feature of SharePoint 2010 that brings immediate business value. As your users traverse sites, they have the ability to tag pages with the help of the I Like It button, found in the upper right corner of a page. At the same time, other users of the same sites can tag pages.

SharePoint uses tags as a way to help users describe content. As users of a site tag information, these tags accrue as metadata. A database of this metadata is kept within SharePoint. With the new managed metadata service, a user can begin typing in a new tag and a list of suggestions will appear. Users can then either use a suggested tag or create one of their own.

Using a tag cloud, the web part allows the user to see all their tags, and each tag is presented as a link to the associated content. This becomes a navigational component.

In this recipe, we will see how to set up a tag cloud and the associated Term Store it consumes. This will give...

Disabling social features for a user

One of the key features of SharePoint 2010 is social components. These components are enabled by default. However, we do not always want users adding tags, using the Note Board and other social features. Organizations might need to turn them off for a particular user or even a group.

Take the case where an organization has a site set up for their vendors to use and exchange information. It may not make sense, from a business perspective, for the users of this site to be tagging items and using the I Like It feature. They are providing information to an organization through the extranet site. They are not looking to do things like rate the information on the site.

In a case like this, the social features can be disabled for that group. In this recipe, we will see how to accomplish this.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site.

How to do it...

1. 1. Open the Central Administration screen and click Application...

Deleting a note associated with a page

Notes associated with tags are powerful as they expose comments of other users to the user community of that portal. The implication of this capability is that users can give information about a page or object and have others view it.

A possible shortcoming of this capability is that company information can possibly be exposed to the people who are not supposed to access it.

Consider the example of product pages. Product pages can be viewed by the whole company and may be rated as new products are developed. This is a powerful feature of SharePoint's new social features.

However, in rating the product, a person may mistakenly put financial information on the Note Board that is exposed publicly within the company. In an enterprise with hundreds or even thousands of products, this information could possibly be exposed for a while.

SharePoint 2010 has a feature where the Farm Administrator can search all the Note Boards for particular information. This recipe...

Viewing an Activity feed

In SharePoint 2010, Activity feeds give SharePoint users the ability to know what their colleagues are doing. A user will track only those colleagues that they are interested in following, which reduces the organization noise.

You can also receive updates in the Newsfeed of your My Site when your colleagues add tags to documents and pages. Also, if you are following a keyword as an interest, you can receive an update when anyone applies that tag to content that you have permission to view.

Every update that occurs is configurable by the user. In this way, users see only those things that they are interested in. In this recipe, we will see where to make these updates.

Getting ready

You must have a My Site set up.

How to do it...

1. 1. Open a team site.

2. 2. Navigate to the upper right-hand corner and click the drop-down list to the right of your name. In the following screenshot, the name is System Account:

3. 3. Click the My Site link.

4. 4. There will be three navigational links...

Setting up and compiling an audience

Audiences are a brilliant way to target content to specific users. Typically, users are in Organizational Units (OU) in Active Directory (AD). This is a way for enterprises to classify the role of an individual in the organization.

A role can be classified by where a person is located—for example, North America, Asia, Europe, and so on. Or the person can be classified by type of employment such as hourly or salary.

Once classified at the AD level, audiences can be applied to a SharePoint audience. Once an audience is created and compiled, it can be applied as a parameter in web parts functionally targeting that content.

This recipe reviews how to create an audience.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site. Set up an OU group named na_hourly in AD (user profile sync must be run for this to be available).

How to do it...

1. 1. Open the Central Administration screen and click Application Management.

2. 2. The...

Creating a synchronization connection

User Profile Synchronization synchronizes directory or business system information with the SharePoint store. This is a two-way sync. However, you must decide whether a specific user profile property will be exported or imported. By default, user profile properties are configured to be imported.

Once this information is imported, it can be utilized in audiences and the social experience, for example, the Silverlight Organization browser found under My Profile.

SharePoint can sync with the following:

• Active Directory Domain Services

• Novell eDirectory version 8.7.3 (LDAP)

• SunOne version 5.2

• IBM Tivoli 5.2

• Business Data Connectivity Service (BCS)

In this recipe, we will set up a connection and start synchronization.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site. The User Profile Synchronization service should be started.

How to do it...

1. 1. Open the Central Administration screen and click Application Management...

Changing import/export for user profiles

SharePoint 2010 synchronization is a two way process—import and export. As stated in the previous recipe, import/export is mutually exclusive and must be configured at the property level.

By default, all properties are import only. This is because when the first synchronization takes place, we want to populate the profile properties in SharePoint and not Active Directory.

As users work with the system and the data matures, it makes sense that some properties should be written back to Active Directory.

This recipe shows how to change the flow (import/export) of data for one property, Picture, to go from SharePoint to Active Directory.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site. There must be an instance of the User Profile Service running.

How to do it...

1. 1. Open the Central Administration screen and click Application Management.

2. 2. The third section is Service Applications. Under this section, click...

Adding a user subtype for user profile

Subtypes are a way of classifying users with a more granular set of properties. Companies have many types of users. Here are some of the types:

• Consultants

• Employees (Hourly/Salary)

• Interns

• Retired employees

This recipe will show how to create a subtype and classify someone.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site. The User Profile Service should be running with users from Active Directory.

How to do it...

1. 1. Open the Central Administration screen and click Application Management.

2. 2. The third section is Service Applications. Under this section, click Manage service applications.

3. 3. Find User Profile Service Application and left-click to the right of the name— the line will be highlighted. Click Manage on the ribbon.

4. 4. Under the section named People, click Manage User Sub-types.

5. 5. The following page will be displayed:

   Enter the value as Consultant for the Name as well as the Display Name... field.

6. 6...

Creating a new user profile property

By default, a SharePoint user profile comes with approximately 68 defined properties. The better populated these elements are, the better the integrity of the social experience in SharePoint.

Many of these properties are mapped to corresponding values in Active Directory. In this way, they can be updated in AD and then the changes are reflected in SharePoint (after a user profile synchronization).

New to SharePoint 2010 is the ability to update AD from SharePoint. While this is not the point of this recipe, it is important to have this information.

While SharePoint has many properties, there always seems to be the business use case outlining a property that SharePoint does not cover. This can be a result of the enterprise and terminology used.

A large enterprise such as a bank is the example we will use in this recipe. We will create a property to store a branch office location where the employee is located. Creating this property helps classify an employee...