We are living in the era of instant news and instant information on "what is happening right now" and "what are you doing right now". Nearly all companies have a Facebook page interaction and mine social data from Twitter feeds and other social networking sites to get the customer perspective of their products and services. When building sites in SharePoint 2013, there are many out-of-box social features available, bringing familiar social experiences to the users.
My Sites in SharePoint 2013 have been improved to include new, modern experiences such as microblogging, which is the basis of the news feeds infrastructure that supports such things as hash tags and mentions and the ability to follow content, people, and other sites. My Sites are the gateway to the information you’re interested in and to the people that you want to interact with. The content that you store in your My Site is yours until you decide to share it and with whom to share it.
Community Sites are new in SharePoint Server 2013. They provide a forum experience that enables people to discuss common interests. Community Sites provide features to organize discussions, moderate conversations and promote participation of members through incentives, such as reputation points, gifted badges, likes and best replies. These features help people share and locate knowledge through persistent, searchable information.
SharePoint Server 2013 can be effectively used by the enterprises bringing together information and people. Enterprises can do some of their key business needs, such as keeping employees up-to-date, breaking down silos, increasing reuse of information, documenting tacit knowledge, finding who knows what, making collaborative decisions and getting work done.
You can create gamification sites in SharePoint 2013 with these new features, creating engaging sites for the employees, customers increasing their level of participation.
The social features in SharePoint 2013 can be summarised as follows:
- Microblogging
- Share content, links, and media
- Follow people, sites, content, and conversations
- Activity Feeds
- Provides a view into recent activity related to content, links, media, and people
- My Sites
- Updated document library capabilities and consolidation of activity
- Share personal documents easily and keep track of access
- Communities
- Community sites with self-service administration and moderation
- Modern community features such as achievements and reputation
- Discussions
- Blogs
- Client application integration
- Categories, comments, and moderation
- Follow people as well as content (documents, sites, tags)
- Keep up-to-date with activities of interest
- Company Feeds
In SharePoint 2013, social networking emphasizes two areas/features, MySites and Communities. MySites is the point where you collect all of your personal productivity materials and Communities are where you gather group materials. It looks like they are sort of rolling blogs and wikis under Communities and PeopleSearch under MySites, while adding Microfeeds as an automated way to aggregate multiple sources of information.