Paul J. Swider presents at SharePoint Saturday New YorkThe first session I attended at SharePoint Saturday New York was Paul J. Swider‘s “The Humanizing of SharePoint,” addressing the enhanced social features in SharePoint 2010.  Paul noted up-front that he was beginning from an assumption that “you’ve reached your own conclusion on [social computing in the enterprise] – I’m just here to show you some cool stuff.”

In discussing the social features available in SharePoint prior to the 2010 release, Paul observed that social functionality was largely “pay to play,” requiring third-party software to accomplish.  That has all changed with the advent of SharePoint 2010, with social features embedded throughout the platform.  Paul mentioned that since the software is more “people-centric” in 2010, combining, to give one example, managed metadata with ratings, users will now be able to provide ratings on metadata throughout SharePoint.

Paul provided a demo in which he showed how to create a new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) site (from Central Admin -> Create site collection -> Create an ECM site), resulting in the ECM site’s creation as a wiki site.  Pointing out that it’s a publishing site, Paul also demonstrated the ability to add a Web Part directly into a wiki page via the Ribbon.

Paul described the User Profile database as being “the key to any social effort in SharePoint … it’s the people store.”  Paul spent some time showing off some (Admin-level) features such as creating custom properties for user profiles, including a couple of new features concerning custom properties such as the ability to create sub-types and term-sets.  Paul pointed out that there are two new services that will be running on the server in 2010 which synchronize all of the user profile info, referring to this as a “new, improved synchronization engine.”

Paul also provided an overview of the new My Site, now called My Profile in 2010, and about which I’ve written previously in my Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010 post from the SharePoint Conference.  Surfacing a blog in 2010 (an option under the Content tab in the My Profile area in this particular case), Paul took the opportunity to show off the in-line Web edit capabilities that are baked in, demonstrating that the contextual Ribbon “lights up” as you’re working with your blog content.  Also demonstrated was that pre-defined term-sets from the managed metadata show up as suggested tags even in the social arena while tagging, for example, a document library.

As final food for thought, I’ll leave you with the following quote from Paul:  “Not a lot of people are talking about it this way, but SharePoint 2010 is the first cloud-enabled server from Microsoft.”

Tune in tomorrow for my recap of Peter Serzo’s “At the Movies with PerformancePoint Services” session from SharePoint Saturday New York.

Read the entire SharePoint Saturday New York series:

• Greetings from SharePoint Saturday New York!
• Paul J. Swider on “The Humanizing of SharePoint” in 2010
• Peter Serzo’s “At the Movies with PerformancePoint Services”
• Michael Lotter’s “SharePoint 2010 Workflow Overview with Visio and SharePoint Designer”
• “Ask the SharePoint Experts” Session with Michael Lotter, Bob Fox, Geoff Varosky and Tony Lanni
• Mark Miller on “Enhancing the SharePoint Interface with jQuery Solutions”