Social Computing and Social Features seem to be the big topics here at the Best Practices conference. Yesterday, I attended the session “Let’s Get Social: Effective Strategies for Leveraging the Social Computing Features of SharePoint 2010” Susan Hanley. Since we are working on a community application which will be available later on this year, I’m curious to hear more about Social Computing from the experts.
 
What I learned from Susan’s session is that if social computing can achieve the following, companies (Business, IT, and executives) will adapt and support:

• Identify the Business Problem:

  • How do you benefit from Social Media and how do you measure success?
• Be prepared to respond to barriers and understand concerns
• Governance Planning and Best Practices
  • Example: Coca-Cola has several great Online Social Media Principles
• Decide which features make sense for your organization
• Define a do-able Pilot Project first

If you ask my co-workers, I’m not a social person. I can sit in the same chair all day without stepping out of my office. But I love to be able to ask questions and get answers from my colleagues and the experts on the Web, so I think that our community application will be useful to a lot of people. Our new application will also have tight integration with PM Central and Workflow Conductor. This community application will help companies who already have SharePoint, have employees not physically co-located, but who are instead working together across an Internet connection. It is for companies who want to retain valuable intellectual property but  also want to encourage employees to collaborate, share knowledge and ease the locating of information and subject matter experts. As we get closer to a release date, I will blog again to provide more information about this new community application and its availability.

Read our complete coverage of the SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011:

• Checking in from Best Practices 2011
• Keynote with Bill English and Owen Allen
• Please Save the Pandas
• Questions from the Bamboo Booth “Do You Offer Installation, Configuration or Training Services?”
• To Social or Not to Social
• Keynote with Ben Curry – SP Server 2010 Best Practices – You Can’t Fix Stupid!
• Why Projects Fail? How to Leverage SharePoint and Bamboo PM Central for Project Management
• Wes Preston Presents ‘SharePoint: When to Crawl, Walk or Run’
• Final Day – Ask the Experts Panel