The personal collaboration features in SharePoint Server 2010, such as My Sites, people search, wikis, blogs, tags, and ratings, can help boost productivity by connecting people and information.
This article describes ways that some organizations are using these features, and provides some tips for rolling out these features in your organization.
In this article
Key benefits of collaboration and community
Personal collaboration tools in SharePoint can help organizations capture and share knowledge, encourage collaboration across teams and locales, enhance learning, and build communities.
Fostering engagement and encouraging innovation
Personal collaboration features can help people connect across teams, roles, and locales. Connecting people with each other and with relevant information can lead to partnerships across organizational boundaries and help cut down on untargeted e-mail messages.
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Building partnerships
Sony Electronics is an example of an organization that is using solutions built on SharePoint to improve communication across different sites throughout the globe, including corporate, engineering, research, and manufacturing.
“Everyone was operating as an island,” explains Jim Whitmoyer, Business Applications Manager at Sony Electronics. “We’d talk with colleagues, but there wasn’t a lot of communication between our U.S. and European offices, for example. So, we looked for ways to take charge and build stronger partnerships between our sister companies, while expanding the boundaries of innovation through collaboration.”
The collaboration tools are helping Sony to meet the needs of different working styles, including workers who telecommute. “We have a lot of affinity groups at Sony, and one of them is targeted at new, young employees who are joining the company,” says Whitmoyer. “Young employees are very excited about social computing because they know they can use it to easily connect with people, at home and at work.
Without a robust collaboration system in place, employees were exchanging ideas and plans mostly through e-mail, which overloaded inboxes and created document versioning issues. “I was on a number of distribution lists, and I got up to 300 e-mails a day,” says Whitmoyer. “I couldn’t just discard them because there might be something in them I needed to know about.”
Additionally, Sony Electronics employees faced challenges navigating the vast amounts of information on the corporate network and tapping into expert resources within the company.
| “We have so many different business units and had so much data floating around,” says Sal Rosales, SharePoint Architect at Sony Electronics. “In order to work effectively and continue to innovate, we need to be able to search for relevant data and pinpoint its owners and authors very quickly.” |
Learn more about the solution in the Sony Electronics Case Study, and learn about the solutions at Sony and other companies in the SharePoint Communities Video.
To successfully foster and drive customer engagements, Accenture needs to attract and develop the right talent, build expertise, and foster an environment where information is shared. One example is Accenture People, described later in this article, which brings together profiles and business data to help people locate expertise and connect with each other.
“To win clients, we have to show that we can seamlessly connect to the people and the data we need to get the job done,” says Miller.
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Engaging volunteers and connecting with the community
The Greater St. Louis Area Council of the Boy Scouts is another example of an organization that is using collaboration tools to better engage its volunteers and build a stronger sense of community.
For example, the council has updated its Web site so that volunteers can contribute content, such as blog posts and photos of events.
| The ability to give volunteers the ability to post photos or videos from a weekend camping event or awards ceremony gets the information up there immediately,” says Joe Mueller, Director of Public Relations of Greater St. Louis Area Council. “We want to harness the passion and creativity of volunteers—that’s why we’ve been so successful for 100 years.” |
Read more about the solution in the Boy Scouts of America Greater St. Louis Area Council Case Study.
Enabling more contributors also enriches “How To” content, such as tips about packing for camping or cooking outdoors. The Scouts can also use wikis to collaborate on songs, stories, games, and honing other skills.
The new solution is helping the Greater St. Louis Area Council of the Boy Scouts to better engage youth, volunteers, parents, donors, and staff through its Web site. The interactive features, such as blogs and interactive maps, help the Council to better answer questions, get parents and volunteers involved, and share ideas and coaching for those new to Scouting.
Beyond enabling volunteers to post content and blogs, the Council plans on using SharePoint Server 2010 to cultivate communities, where any group of people with common interests can exchange ideas and best practices.
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Capturing, sharing, and finding knowledge
Providing ways to help employees share information can help some organizations capture knowledge that might otherwise go untapped.
Features such as wikis help organizations to collect and organize informal information, ranging from general tips for new employees to specialized information built up over years of experience. Other tools, such as profiles and tagging, help people to connect with each other and find knowledgeable people quickly.
EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, is an intergovernmental organization made up of 38 Member States and the European Community. EUROCONTROL is exploring wikis, blogs, and document collaboration features 2010 as a way to encourage sharing of expert information in specialized areas.
EUROCONTROL has a number of initiatives aimed at a safer, more efficient, and more environmentally-friendly airspace. However, accomplishing these goals requires coordination among a myriad of agencies and other stakeholders.
The organization is testing a comprehensive solution that would a central location in which both internal and external stakeholders can collaborate, refine processes, exchange information, and capture expertise.
| Alexandre Dumortier, Project Manager on the Collaboration Project at EUROCONTROL, said, “We have many experts in specialized topics such as the statistical analysis of air traffic flows, whose knowledge is really only in their own heads…We want to offer them a place to share this knowledge and combine it with that of others, for the greater good of the organization.” |
Read more about the project in the EUROCONTROL Case Study.
Collaboration tools help Electronic Arts (EA) pull together ideas and expertise across major locations on several continents. “Sharing ideas, or looking for help, across an organization as big as EA is no easy feat,” explains Bert Sandie, Director of Technical Excellence at Electronic Arts. Sandie is a senior member of the EA University team, which provides “on-boarding” training for new employees, ongoing training for existing employees, and knowledge management coordination.
“We needed a better way to help employees with particular jobs or talents find one another,” Sandie recalls. “For example, a graphic artist might be developing swords and daggers for a new game, when there are other artists throughout the company who have already created swords and daggers for other games. Finding other people at EA doing the same thing you were doing depended on who you knew. Newer employees were at a disadvantage because they simply hadn’t built up those networks.”
Brian Plank, Director of Product Development for EA Technology at Electronic Arts, designed games for ten years and confirms importance of networking. “Your best advantage as a developer is talking to people who have worked on similar problems.”
“For example, someone may share an idea on EA People that may spur multiple discussions. These sorts of discussions lead to innovation,” said Plank.
Read more about the solution in the Electronic Arts Case Study or watch the Electronic Arts Case Study Video. Find more details about how profiles can help employees connect with each other later in this article.
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Enhancing Learning
Personal collaboration tools can enhance learning, both in the corporate and educational environments. People can connect with people and other resources, learn from each other, and collaborate both in and outside of the classroom.
Employee onboarding in a corporate environment
Electronic Arts (EA), for example, has created communities where new hires can find the knowledge and personal connections they need to be successful quickly. For example, new artists can join the “artist on-boarding” group. There, they can find videos they need to watch, best practices, useful Web sites, links to other groups, training on software programs, conferences, relevant articles and blogs, and links to other people at EA doing similar work.
“We want to make the on-boarding process more useful to employees, to provide better information and enable employees to access it when they need it,” Sandie says. “Converting on-boarding into an e-learning environment enables new employees to digest a vast amount of information when they are ready to assimilate it.”
TELUS, a Canadian telecommunications company, is also using personal collaboration features to support corporate learning.
TELUS is augmenting formal, classroom-based learning with informal and social learning through its “Learning 2.0” initiative. The solution includes Webcasts, books, mentoring, coaching, and job rotations, while social learning includes videos, blogs, microblogs, and wikis.
“We set the goal of making team member education more continuous, collaborative, and connected,” says Dan Pontefract, Senior Director of Learning at TELUS.
TELUS anticipates that the collaborative tools will provide multiple ways that people can share their insights and pass along institutional knowledge. Team members will be able to learn more quickly because knowledge will be readily available from experts within the company, as opposed to solely through scheduled classes. The company also expects to see increased team member engagement and better sharing of institutional knowledge.
Introducing informal and social avenues of knowledge sharing has become more important to TELUS because its current workforce is made up of increasingly younger team members who consider social networking to be a basic communication tool. About 40 percent of team members are in their 50s and 60s; 35 percent in their 30s and 40s; and 25 percent in their 20s. “Within the next 10 years, we could see 40 percent of our work force retire,” says Pontefract.
Academy Mobile at Microsoft is another example of a corporate learning solution. Academy Mobile is a central location where field experts share knowledge in a podcast format that is easily consumable and searchable by employees in the field.
Ludovic Fourrage, Director of the Enablement Platform and Operations, heard that field professionals like Mike Gannotti, a Technology Specialist in North Carolina, were looking for new ways to integrate Microsoft training into their busy lives. “I’m never in one place long enough to finish an Academy Focus course,” Gannotti says. “I don’t need a week-long course on Microsoft SharePoint technologies.”
Being able to listen to broadcasts from peer experts in between working with customers helps address that need.
Fourrage said social computing technology seems to offer what the field is looking for—quick, easy, and interactive ways to communicate self-generated information across the globe in a way that fit the busy schedules of people on the road.
“I felt sure that I could repurpose social computing technology to better meet the needs of the sales field because I had seen the growth of blogs, wikis, and podcasting within Microsoft,” he says. “The Academy’s existing technology solution wasn’t working for all our field sales professionals. We were spending money developing online courses that they couldn’t fit into their lives. However, they do have short periods of time to consume knowledge in between meetings and while driving to customers.
| Phil Morel, Director at Microsoft Academy and Events, says it’s important to leverage knowledge among employees in the field. “Anywhere you have large numbers of mobile or distributed employees, it’s in a company’s best interest to facilitate knowledge sharing among peers. |
There’s no better way to recognize the value people bring to an organization.” Read more about the solution in the Microsoft Academy Case Study.
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In the classroom
Twynham School, a state school in Christchurch Dorset in the United Kingdom, uses SharePoint to extend learning around the clock.
The school has implemented centralized, online access to learning resources to provide a richer learning experience. Says Mike Herrity, Assistant Head Teacher at Twynham School. The school specializes in technology and music, designated “Leading Edge School” in the United Kingdom.
| “Our objective is to listen to the voices of the students to discover what will help them learn better. Predominantly, students told us that they wanted to be able to get to their resources all the time, and from anywhere,” says Herrity. |
Read more about Twynham’s solution at the SharePoint in Education website and in the Twynham School Case Study.
Students also wanted to access multimedia files from the school’s digital library, lesson plans, teacher’s notes, and more – whether at school or from home.
SharePoint Server 2010 includes many tools that help students and teachers more easily engage with the learning gateway. SharePoint Server 2010 supports rich editing environments such as wiki pages that students and staff can take advantage of to quickly create their own content. Wikis support inline editing and multimedia management, so users can embed video into their pages.
Students and staff can view thumbnails and preview video files from the school’s collection. They can also watch videos directly in the browser rather than having to open a separate media-viewing application. Metadata tagging capabilities make it easier for Twynham user to find multimedia assets within the school’s extensive collection.
Twynham has also used SharePoint Server 2010 to strengthen the school community, making it easier for students to connect with each other, with teachers, and for parents to fully engage in the learning process. “But just as importantly,” says Herrity, “SharePoint Server 2010 has helped us engage with the Christchurch community.”
The school’s community portal fosters the Christchurch Learning Partnership, through which Christchurch residents can keep up-to-date with the school’s activities and schedules. “We see the SharePoint Server 2010-based portal as an essential part of the broader community,” says Herrity. “Schools and other learning establishments are now better connected through the collaborative tools in SharePoint Server 2010 which helps them to share ideas, vision, and resources.”
Washington State University also helps students to connect to resources around the globe at any time of day.
Gary Brown, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at WSU, says “We are committed to the advancement of authentic learning—learning that takes place in and beyond the classroom—that encourages the exchange of knowledge across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries, and that recognizes the need for participation in a global dialogue.”
Students are encouraged to own their learning experience, and to reach out beyond the classroom.
Brown calls this approach “learning ownership.” He explains: “This would put students squarely in the center of their learning network, which starts with their classmates and their professors and extends out through the university to the rest of the world through digital communications and social networking.”
| “When students leave school, they will enter jobs where collaboration and virtual teams are commonplace,” says Brown. “Our learning environment should give students opportunities to collaborate across the curriculum, both within the university and beyond. The student should always be in control of the intellectual connections he or she wants to make to shape his or her learning.” |
Read more about the learning solution in the Washington State University Case Study or see the Washington State University Case Study Video.
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Collaboration features in use
This section describes how organizations are implementing specific collaboration features, such as wikis, blogs, My Sites, profiles, ratings, and social tags.
Wikis and Blogs
Wikis can be used to capture insights and “institutional knowledge” into one place, onboard new employees, and to help support instruction. Blogs can informally describe events and provide additional perspectives.
Read articles and watch videos about working with Blogs and wikis.
SonyPedia at Sony Electronics
Sony Electronics is using enhanced wiki capabilities to help employees exchange and manage information and encourage innovation through SonyPedia. The wiki helps to capture employees’ insight and comments, while employees help to govern the content.
“With wiki functionality in SharePoint Server, we’re building what we call SonyPedia – bringing together insights from employees across the enterprise into a single body of knowledge, driving us toward a more unified company, says Whitmoyer.
Infopedia at Microsoft
At Microsoft, employees use the wiki feature in SharePoint Server 2010 to publish content to InfoPedia, where information about a broad variety of topics and projects.
Employees create individual content pages that include a description of their document or presentation, and they can enter metadata tags to describe their content.
The wiki functionality enables content owners to edit text directly within the web page, using a rich text editor with the familiar Ribbon feature that is part of the Microsoft Office Fluent interface. Users can also easily upload images and video.
A workflow routes newly uploaded or edited content to the appropriate reviewers. When a publisher uploads content to a wiki page, or a user modifies existing content, this triggers a workflow.
For instance, if someone makes changes to content on a wiki page or within a document in the system, the original content owner is notified and given the chance to check the content and approve it or make further modifications. “These features allow us to maintain a governance model to ensure that content is accurate and approved for use,” says Fourrage.
The wiki is based on a template with a standardized layout and design. The wiki provides a consistent experience that makes it easier for users to find content. InfoPedia combines SharePoint Server 2010 content management features with FAST Search Server 2010 to enhance the search experience.
“We attacked our problem from two directions,” explains Fourrage. “Microsoft employees were experiencing information overload. We wanted to improve employees’ process of finding information, so we improved the navigation and search process, but we also improved how information is published.. Read more details in the Microsoft Collaboration Platform Case Study,
Blogs for Boy Scouts
Blogs are helping the Greater St. Louis Area Council of the Boy Scouts to make its Web site more interactive and to engage a wider audience. Volunteers, who are critical communicators within the Scouting community, can contribute blog posts about their experiences, which helps encourage other people to participate.
“The ability to give volunteers the ability to post photos or videos from a weekend camping event or awards ceremony gets the information up there immediately,” says Mueller. “We want to harness the passion and creativity of volunteers—that’s why we’ve been so successful for 100 years.”
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My Sites, Profiles, and People Search
My Sites, profiles, and people search provide ways for employees to share information about themselves, including past projects and areas of knowledge.
Employees can search people’s profiles to locate subject matter expertise and people working on similar projects. Profiles can be enhanced by integrating them with relevant business data.
Find more information, see Help on My Sites and profiles or take the My Sites: Connecting to people and information training course. For more information for administrators on planning, see the Enterprise Collaboration in SharePoint Server 2010 Resource Center.
Accenture People
Accenture has a business networking solution called Accenture People that is built on SharePoint My Sites. Inside a My Site, users can fill out their profile page. Details on these profiles are searchable, so that Accenture consultants can find subject matter experts across the organization, learn more about their peers, and search for users with similar personal or professional interests.
“Our first iteration of Accenture People had the My Sites automatically populated for each employee with corporate data, such as work organization, level, phone number, office location, reporting structure, resumé information, and skills,” says Miller. “We are building on these capabilities, customizing the user interface based on employee feedback to organize content so it’s more intuitive. For the My Profile, we are adding new fields and encouraging people to upload more information about themselves, including pictures and little-known facts, such as favorite movie and/or type of music.”
“I know that some organizations feel that social networking technologies detract from an employee’s productive work, but we have experienced the opposite,” says Miller. “En masse, our people find the right amount of time to devote to business networking to derive the optimal value out of the solution.
Profiles at Fleishman-Hillard
Fleishman-Hillard, a strategic communications company, uses business data to dynamically pull together profile information about employees and customers. The new solution has replaced a more static portal, which sometimes led to “blast e-mails” when people needed to locate information or people quickly.
Fleishman-Hillard concluded that it needed to replace its existing portal solution with technology that could help staff interact and collaborate more effectively, as well as respond more to urgent requests by quickly locating relevant data and subject matter expertise.
| Jonella Donius, Senior Vice President, Senior Partner, and Chief Information Officer at Fleishman-Hillard, said, “Our company has enthusiastically embraced social networking. In today’s communications environment, these tools are critical to our ability to help clients connect with their key audiences. Internally, the informal nature of these tools, and the networking capabilities they provide, help employees find and share information very quickly.” |
Read more about the solution in the Fleishman-Hillard Case Study.
The new solution, which is built on SharePoint, dynamically incorporates business data into its profiles, including data from PeopleSoft. This data includes client accounts an employee has worked on, which practice groups the employee has participated in, specific employee skills and expertise, and more.
Donius said, “We are using SharePoint Server 2010 to draw on this valuable content, gather relevant material into a centralized location, and present it in a useful manner.”
The solution can also generate a dynamic client profile page that shows who has worked with that client, and from which office and practice group was involved, as well as the client’s industry category and its history with the company.
Donius adds, “Many times we are called on by a client to help them respond quickly to a crisis that threatens their reputation. Especially in these situations, quickly locating the right expertise and resources is critical to providing the Fleishman-Hillard is able to present information from different perspectives.
EA People
Electronic Arts also uses business data to help populate its profiles, known as EA People. Employees fill out a few details about themselves, while some data is already populated from the company’s PeopleSoft human resources application.
Employees can post technical skills, interests, current work projects, past experience, list of colleagues, career interests, and personal information such as favorite games and books.
Employees select skills from a predefined skills library and roles from a number of “job families” such as artist, finance, or human resources. Under their job family, employees also select primary and secondary disciplines. For example, an artist’s primary discipline might be animation and their secondary might be characters. By using standard lists of skills and roles, employees can search EA People for colleagues performing the same job or possessing the same skills, anywhere in the company. Employees can even use SharePoint team sites to create communities around certain skills, roles, and interests.
A popular feature has been a small organizational chart on each profile that shows where the individual fits into their immediate EA group and overall corporate hierarchy. EA People has links to the profiles of that individual’s peers and managers. “This feature is really valuable to understand where you fit in the organization and where others fit, especially if it is the first time you are interacting with them,” Sandie says.
Another simple but popular addition was a map showing where the individual sits in their EA building. “Some of these features are small things, but they help to humanize work in a large environment,” Sandie says. “If someone’s having a meeting with me, they know where to find me and even what I look like before we get together. Being able to see a photo of a person you deal with over e-mail all the time makes conversations more personal. We ran a user survey after the initial launch, and we were surprised to find that these small touches were the most popular features. They make work more personal, and they save time.”
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Metadata, social tags, and ratings
Collaboration and document management features such as metadata and ratings help people to identify and find relevant information more quickly. Ratings can also help content authors identify the content that readers find most useful.
Fleishman-Hillard also enhanced content tagging capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010 to help employees more easily and intuitively find information and resources among the company’s vast amounts of data.
The centralized tag taxonomy system in SharePoint 2010 enables Fleishman-Hillard to assign keywords to each document, file, or other resource it generates, according to an overarching corporate taxonomy. With the system, employees can add tags to the content they create.
For instance, if an employee completes a case study, he or she can add tags that indicate the practice group that produced the piece, the topic, the customers it includes, and more. This enables people to dig and sort information dynamically, such as by topic, practice group, client, office, or account team.
At Twynham school, students can tag, rate, and comment on content in the learning portal. For example, if a student finds a learning resource (such as a sample test or a presentation) particularly useful, the student can rate the resource with a high mark, making it easy for other students to identify valuable resources.
Teachers can also see how students have rated each learning resource (based on a one-to-five star rating system), and can use this information to develop new resources.
Social features help to supplement site analytics, says Herrity, and help guide the direction of new content. With SharePoint Server 2010, we can see which resources are used the most, and with features such as tags, ratings, and commentary, we can also see, very quickly, which resources students rate the highest. Students can use this knowledge to develop more effective resources.
“We can take the highest-rated resources and post them more centrally, and we can also use them as models, in terms of format or structure—for developing new resources,” says Herrity. “SharePoint Server 2010 makes it easy for us to identify the educational resources that truly work for our students.”
For more information, see the SharePoint 2010 Help topics on Managed metadata and Content ratings.
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Some tips for success
The best strategies for developing and rolling out collaborative solutions depend on several factors, including company size, corporate culture, specific business needs, and resources. This section describes some general tips that have helped some organizations.
Focus on the user need or business problem
Focusing on helping users with a business need or solving a problem usually yields better results than focusing on the technology itself.
Christian Finn, a Director of SharePoint at Microsoft, says that when you focus on the business need, then the users are more likely to see the value of a solution, and to use it in an immersive way to connect with other employees.
The business need might be connecting people with each other across the globe or with relevant information for their job. People in the field might benefit from increased access to corporate resources, and people in a central office might learn from the insights and experiences of people in the field.
For example, Academy Mobile was developed to address the needs of sales staff that had few opportunities for formal training. “Take the time to understand how your user base will best consume information. We looked at adapting consumer oriented technology to deliver relevant information to the sales force in a way that was easily consumable on any device, at any time,” says the Academy Mobile staff. You can find additional lessons learned in the Microsoft Academy Case Study.
It’s also important to get user feedback and adjust accordingly to ensure that employees’ needs are met and they feel like they have a stake in the process.
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Promote the solution
Help people to know that the solution is available, whether it’s through formal sponsorship and promotion or viral word of mouth. Identifying and connecting communities of interest, such as people with similar roles or interests, can also help generate enthusiasm.
Accenture, for example, chose a soft-launch approach for Accenture People, encouraging employees to use the site through intermittent, enterprise campaigns and endorsement from senior management. “A great way to encourage people to fill out and personalize their profile sites was through the concept of ‘we are looking for you,’” says Miller. “This shows the value of the site as a way to grow your career by advertising your talents so that we can promote your unique skills.”
Electronic Arts (EA) used “early adopters” and word-of-mouth to generate excitement. Says Sandie, “We realized that employees would be more likely to use EA People because they wanted to use it, rather than because corporate said they should. Our premise was, if it’s valuable to one person, they’ll tell a friend.”
EA engaged 50 employees who were active on other social media sites, and asked them to spread the word about EA People. These first 50 people provided names of additional people who might be interested. From these leads, Sandie assembled an informal group of beta users who provided early site testing. The word about EA People indeed spread, and within a year, one-third of EA’s worldwide employee base was participating.
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Provide an engaging, easy-to-use experience
Providing an engaging, interactive experience keeps people coming back. Providing a distinctive look and feel to a site and enabling ratings and tags are some ways to keep a site lively.
It can also help to make it easy for users to participate. For example, Academy Mobile provides podcasting details and even equipment, as well as user incentives for participation.
“The easier you make it for busy sales professionals to contribute, the more they will contribute,” says Microsoft Industry Architect Dave Coplin. “Say you’ve just had a brilliant meeting with a customer and made a sale using an innovative approach. You can be recording your thoughts and uploading your experience as you drive out of their parking lot.”
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Additional Resources
The list below includes resources mentioned throughout this article, as well as other resources about collaboration with SharePoint Server.
Overview Information
Case Studies
Training and Help Articles
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