Communities and Enterprise 2.0
SharePoint Community Wiki
Community is medium that allows individuals and groups to easily virtually network and gives them the ability to share information with the emphasis on participating in similar goals or subjects. SharePoint has features that support these communities. These features are appropriate for simple communities to more sophisticated communities. This module also contains a brief history of SharePoint Communities describing improvements in support of Communities.
Functional Communities
Functional Communities are a set of simple SharePoint Community features appropriate for users of SharePoint to contribute informational items about similar goals. Among these features are:
- Lists and Libraries
- Discussions
- Calendars
- Alerts
- News feeds
Enterprise Collaborative CommunitiesEnterprise Collaborative Communities are SharePoint Communities that offer more sophisticated features that provide additional interaction between members of web communities when virtually networking amongst each other. Each of these new Enterprise Collaborative SharePoint Communities offers many features that make communication within these web communities much easier to participate in, track, and search for information.
Offline CommunitiesOffline Communities are SharePoint Communities that offer features similar to the standard SharePoint Web interface, but in an offline environment. These features offer the ability to use SharePoint content while disconnected from the SharePoint system. Content may be created or updated offline, and will be synchronized with the SharePoint system when the user is next connected to it.
Enterprise 2.0Enterprise 2.0 is a term that is used to describe the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 systems are:
- Freeform - there should be no learning curve or other restrictions on using the system
- Network-oriented - all of the content in the system is web-addressable, usually in the form of URLs
- Social - its information should be accessible, its membership and content should be diverse and that its structure should be open and amenable to change
- Emergent - it can detect and leverage the collective wisdom of the community
ComponentsThere is a wide range of components that SharePoint provides that can be used to construct and manage SharePoint communities. They include web parts and particular types of the following:
- Lists and Libraries
- Calendars
- Discussions
- Shared Documents, News and Alerts
- People Profiles, Photo and Presence
- Status Updates
- Ask Me About
- SharePoint Workspace
- Note Board
- Recent Articles
- Organization Browsers
- Colleagues, Social Bookmarks
- My Network
- Keyword Suggestions
- Managed Metadata, Taxonomies, Tags and Tag Clouds
- Blogs
- Wikis, Tag Profile Pages
- Ratings
- Office Applications
- Group Work Site
Records Management and Compliance with CommunitiesRecord Management and Compliance are hard to apply to SharePoint Communities because of the communities’ dynamic nature, the context-dependent nature of the content that they contain, the difficulties involved in identifying actual record content and the risks to privacy and ease of use that these management techniques might introduce. SharePoint Communities require governance in order to avoid exposing the enterprise to undue risk.
