Social networking features in SharePoint 2010

In this article I am giving you a small introduction on SharePoint 2010 Social networking capabilities. Social networking capabilities have been improved a lot in SharePoint 2010. Let us see some of the best improvements.

Profile Page

Profile page in SharePoint 2010 has been improved a lot. Now it is giving somewhat similar to the functionalities that we seen in Facebook or Twitter

• Overview - It displays basic profile of the user. User picture and presence information linked to the Office Communicator. It also includes ccolleague web part and a web part showing our commonalities with other users
  
  
• Organization - It contains an org chart. It shows our peers to the right and  superiors above. It is very nice web part essential in organization.
  
  
• Content - It displays all our recent activity like recently used documents or new blog posts etc.
  
  
• Tags and Notes - It will display all your tags and notes.
  
  
• Colleagues - This is the list of people in our organization. We can add other from the organization as our colleagues.
  
  
• Memberships - This shows all our the distribution lists and sites that that we belongs.

(Click on image to view bigger image)

Picture Library

SharePoint 2010 has added a better way to manage your users' profile pictures. It utilizes a central repository that can then be pushed to AD and we can use the same in any other application.

I Like, Tags & Notes

This is a very good addition to SharePoint 2010 feature list. When a user clicks on I like it, it is saved as bookmark and when he click on Tags and Notes, small snippets and description can be added to the page .User have the flexibility to  set it as  private or public. The tags set as public can be used to suggest tags to other users and can be used in search. Tags can be added to a page or a document.