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Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Introduction to My Sites in SharePoint 2007

Introduction to My SitesI was flipping through SlideShare.net this morning and did a search for SharePoint. The first one that came up had over 50,000+ views! What could be THAT interesting in SharePoint, enough to convince 50,000 people to view it? My Sites by Robert Wurhman.

I’ve embedded the presentation below. It’s essential that we get a clear picture of the purpose of My Sites as we move forward into a more socially oriented SharePoint. I’m interested in your feedback… is this subject worth a deeper dive?

 

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6 Responses to “Introduction to My Sites in SharePoint 2007”
  1. Jay says:

    My Sites are a potentially powerful tool that many organizations do not fully take advantage of for any number of reasons. I think that primary being the perception that anything of a “social” nature in the office environment amounts to time wasting (just another of the myriad of cultural issues you have to contend with as part of an implementation).

    Microsoft has a case study on Electronic Arts and how they are leveraging MOSS 2007 and My Sites to build an suceesful internal social network. The case study has been up for a while, I think it would be interesting to see a follow up and see where they are now with it.

    http://sharepoint2007.microsoft.com/social/successes/pages/successes-details.aspx?ItemId=3

    I would point out one thing regarding implementing My Sites. I feel pretty strongly that if you wanted to do this that having a strong governance plan in place is extremely important. With the amount of personal information (brings up training on what doesn’t go in your My Site and what does) that could be shared there is a potential for privacy issues that needs to be addressed before the implementation rather than after.

    - Jay

  2. Marcel Meth says:

    Interesting thing is that every slide provides the URL: http://www.mossusergroup.com. When I tried to navigate to the site, I get a parked site page. Hmmmm Seems like soime useful things could be done with this url.

  3. Chris Quick says:

    In general, I’m finding that many businesses are very interested in creating a social platform as a way to drive productivity and collaboration, and most begin with My Sites. The organization envisons this wonderful place for employees to share ideas, get feedback on issues and find subject matter experts, so they turn on my sites for the organization and walk away thinking they’ve just provided a way for everyone to get connected.

    However, the end result is that the My Site quickly becomes nothing more than a file share that is usually an alternate to the network file share. The business describes the endeavor as a success because XX percent are using my sites, but asking the average user how often do you update your profile reveals a much more telling experience with most only updating their profiles the first time they visit their My Site.

    I think there is tremendous value in examining My Sites in depth to find more value to the business community.

  4. Kerri says:

    I agree that there is a great deal of potential there, but I think some fundamental Sharepoint should be understood before people just jump in, education, education, education. One example of using them as a resource came to mind as a result of a comment a new employee mentioned the other day. This new employee has been brought on-board to manage a pretty large project for the team she supports, but she is new to the organization, so finding the people who manage permissions for the different platforms we support has been a real challenge for her. If everyone had a Details page, it would be much easier for her to search specialties. It would be an ideal test situation too, having IT use them prior to a full org roll-out just to set the tone and intent… and aid in building governance through experience.

    • Jay says:

      That was one of the things that EA did in the case study that I liked. They started with a small group, of course in their case a small group was 50 people, and let it grow slowly from there.

  5. Scott says:

    I just had to remove My Sites from our corporate SharePoint site. Management had the misguided belief that it was like Facebook and provided employees with too much “stalking ability”.

    Some other reasons they wanted it removed was that it provided a organization hierarchy. Even though Outlook can present you with this information as well, it was just too easy to see in SharePoint My Sites.

    Even with our SharePoint Governance plan, countless training sessions and one-on-one work, sometimes management just does not see value that the employees do.


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