Social Networking Features of MOSS 2007

Following is a list of some features provided by MOSS 2007 that will help developers to easily provide social networking features in MOSS based Enterprise wide Social Networking applications.

Colleagues: One of the main Social Networking components of MOSS 2007 is the concept of "Colleagues".

Colleagues are a list of friends, team members and co-workers that are related to a specific person through the establishment of a user profile.

A list of colleagues for a user is set up at the time of the user's profile creation and of course can be updated later through various built-in web parts. The details about the colleagues can be obtained from the Active Directory, Exchange Server, Live Communications Server 2005 or Office Communications Server 2007 set ups within the organization. Thus, the colleagues list is populated primarily based on Organization hierarchy. As a result, peers, supervisors, managers become a part of the colleagues. Additionally, MOSS can also gather this information by mining data sources like Outlook 2007 and IM contacts. (Note that privacy could become an issue here).

Through the list of colleagues, a user can find subject experts and key contacts within the organization, enabling increased and faster lines of communication.

Built-in Web Parts:

Colleagues Web Part: The colleagues web part allows users to present their mined and compiled colleagues to visitors. The colleagues list is a presentation of other organization members that the specified user works closely with in terms of organizational structure, interaction (i.e., email conversations and instant messaging contact lists) and group/site memberships. SharePoint can make recommendations regarding a colleague based on commonality of interactivity with these small groups, but users can also manually add and remove colleagues.

Colleagues Tracker Web Part: The colleague tracker web part allows organization members to privately view their list of compiled colleagues and to modify their views and inclusion in their colleagues list. The colleague tracker web part allows for the presentation of recommended colleagues and allows the user to modify colleague tracking by profile information. For example, users can modify the colleague tracker to present updated colleagues when anniversaries, profile properties, authored documents and blogs change. Additionally, scoping the presentation can occur when users choose to view colleagues specifically for the user's workgroup or organization-wide.

In Common With Web Part: Office SharePoint Server provides a summary view of information relating to the memberships, organizational managers and colleagues that a visitor has in common with the owner of a My Site.

Membership Web Parts, Links, Sharepoint Sites: These web parts provide the ability for users to view their own Office SharePoint Server site, group and mail list memberships and links as well as those that they have in common with others. Additionally, visitors can view a user's memberships, Office SharePoint Server Sites and distribution group memberships.

Web Parts: Colleague Tracker, Colleague Web Part, Membership Web Part

Presence Information: When coupled with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information indicating online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information is displayed whenever user information is presented (i.e., colleagues and colleague tracker web parts, etc.).

People Search: Office SharePoint Server supports the discovery of team members, colleagues and other individuals by exposing a search interface in which information workers can search on the organization's personnel. Results are returned to users and are presented in terms of social distance and relevance for grouping. The search can further be refined by user profile attributes including job title and alternatively be viewed based on search term relevance.

My Sites: Finallty, "My Sites" is the place where the list of colleagues will get displayed. My Site allows users to present information about their skills, individuals they know as well as other social information to visitors.

Content from the link: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/10/24/enabling-and-managing-social-networks-for-business-use-with-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx (contains some nice images / screenshots of the Sharepoint application)