Social Media @ Microsoft – SharePoint 2010

Microsoft intranet has been using SharePoint 2010 for the company's intranet MSWeb. Sharepoint is one-stop "content and collaboration" platform, has been around since 2001 and saw widespread adoption since 2007 with the integration of social software, such as blogs, wikis and social networking web sites. Another reason of increasing adoption was partnership with companies like wiki maker Atlassian and RSS vendor NewsGator to incorporate more social technologies into SharePoint 2007. Other enterprise social media companies like SocialText (wikis) and Jive (blogs and wikis) made their products compatible with SharePoint. Presently Microsoft IT environment has 121,000 end users including 92,000 employees in 98 countries and activity involves 3 million internal emails per day, 10 million inbound emails per day and 33 thousand IM per day.

SharePoint 2010 was a more advanced version and it gained more adoption due to the addition of personal blogs, tagging and activity feeds within its social networking sites, called MySites. My Site is a personal site that has a user interface similar to Facebook profile pages, a central location to manage and store documents, content, links, and contacts and also serves as a point of contact for other users in organization to find information about employees, their skills and interests. My Site includes two parts: a personal site called My Home and a public profile page called My Profile. Activity Feed shows activities including; content rating; activities relating to Tags that the employee is following; or activities relating to the employees contacts or connections. ‘Send Kudos’ feature which enables one employee to send publicly visible praise to another. Secondly is a Twitter like micro-blogging feature based on ‘OfficeTalk’, a technology produced by the Microsoft Office Labs team and feature includes the ability to create and follow hash tags. Employees typically create websites using SharePoint to easily share and organize team information and best practices removing the need to e-mail documents around.

A wiki feature in SharePoint Server 2010 to create and publish individual content pages is InfoPedia that include a description of the document or presentation, easily upload images and video and metadata tags can be entered to describe the content. The wiki functionality enables content owners to edit text directly within the web page, using a rich text editor with the Ribbon feature that is part of the Microsoft Office Fluent interface. A workflow routes newly uploaded or edited content to the appropriate reviewers. The wiki is based on a template with a standardized layout and design and makes it easier for users to find content. InfoPedia combines SharePoint Server 2010 content management features with FAST Search Server 2010 to enhance the search experience.

In 2007, Microsoft launched Academy Mobile, a corporate podcasting & social media platform to help employees share knowledge using audio and video podcasts. It is just like YouTube where users can upload videos, rate videos, comment on videos, and this site is only for Microsoft employees focused on connecting Microsoft employees around the globe and the site is iPhone-friendly. To encourage filming by employees, Microsoft has a program called Podcast-in a-Box in which workers can borrow a professional video recorder to produce content. Microsoft has a system in which the more videos a worker produces, the more points one gets and the points can be cashed in for prizes.

Microsoft employees send 13 million e-mails every day, have 325,000 team SharePoints and 52,000 My Sites and Search is the glue that holds them together. Microsoft realized that the current intranet model is very complex with too many sites and employees are looking for freedom to move among devices and visit social media and rich media sharing sites with ease. Microsoft employees are heavy social-media users, a new report from marketing database company NetProspex and rankings are based on "friendliness" (i.e., the number of online friends people had) and Twitter score, which took into account the number of tweets people had posted and the number of followers they'd accrued.

Employees and other stakeholders interacting directly and collaborating will lead to co creation of new products and services and will ultimately lead to the organizational profitability. Microsoft uses a decision framework to assess risk. And one side of the framework they consider the business value, while risk mitigation is on the other side and business value outweighs risk. Company is using Microsoft Online Services to make it possible for employees to securely access the applications they need from any device with an Internet connection. Microsoft believes communication can certainly be enhanced through the judicious use of new communication technologies and can be enriched by adding social media to the communication mix.