This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Talks 2009 Las Vegas, speaker: Venky Veeraraghavan @venkyv MS. @SPSocial = twitter account for the social team.

This session is about what is necessary to install My site personal network, Social feedback and People and Expertise search. Just putting the software on the server is not enough to get it going.

The presenter shows the My profile page. The Overview tab really consists of Question me About, Recent activities, In Common with you and the new Note board. The Organizational tab contains contains a stacked overview of your organizational hierarchy with you in de middle and colleagues to the left and right of you and the managers on the top.

My site components
The My network, My Profile and My Make pleased are the main components / pages. So how does that relate to Site collections? Really the My Site contains of two site collections: the My Site host and the My Site. The My site host is scheming the My Network and My profile pages. The My make pleased is controlled by the My site collection. These site collections can now be related to Web applications. So how does that correlate? Basically both site collections are hosted by the same web attention. But the service applications consists of EMM (metadata), UPA (user profiles) and Search.

Activity feed
The activity feed is new. It is about an extensible Activity feed and a web part. There are two types: consolidated and published. The consolidated are activities from everything you track. Other people consume this information when they have access to it. Published means that the author decides himself to publish the activity. The way both are consumed are through different URLs. Architectural it means that all of the social data is gathered by a timer job, just like the user profile data is gathered. It will then be stored in a user profile db as activity feed data. Reason for that is basically scalability. On the front end it will be show any by a web part or an atom feed.

For 3rd party supplier the extensibility of the activity feed makes it fascinating. Take for instance the activity attention like CRM and the type “new meeting”, the template would be “person” has scheduled a meeting with “consumer” on “details”.

Profile pictures
Profile pictures are centralized at the My site host web attention. The pictures are resizable three ways: 32×32, 48×48 and 96×96. The picture picker is customizable and replaceable to support a companies policy and picture store. There is a powershell command to upgrade your store from MOSS 2007. You can also take AD as the source of your profile pictures and even sync back if configured.

Privacy
Key stakeholders are IT, Legal, HR and business drivers. The top issues are around Picture treatment: consent, corporate policy and the activity feed: who follows me, two-way consent. Who can social tag and bookmark? You should need to define an acceptable use policy. What happens when the employee leaves?

Demo: social feedback
This is all about getting feedback through social tags, notes and ratings. These kinds of feedback help to categorize, comment on, promote or retrieve make pleased. At the very basic level it is a 3-tuple: person, URI, feedback.

Scalability
This can become reasonably large in huge enterprises. First make some assumptions, next get an average for tags added per document and how many ID were managed with metadata. If necessary scale up. Co-locate managed metadata, profile and search when possible because of the cross service dependency. So even if the services topology allows you to separate them completely, reflect about keeping them close together.

Expertise search
You can leverage things like About me, Question me about and Interests as part of the profile search consequences. Viewing recent make pleased is a link that builds on top of the activity feeds discussed earlier.

Knowledge mining
Outlook will be analyzed and for instance tags you use will be send to SharePoint. Where are the tags: Outlook 2010, SharePoint 2010. But you can also control this. Like if you don’t want to analyze email. There is also an option in Outlook that is about analyzing and uploading options that need consent from the user. Finally, there is user consent on the server. Like Question me about is visible to everyone.
Wrapping up: breakdown takes part on the client –> then it will need consent both at the client and server –> then it get indexed on the server –> finally it may be queried both at the server and client.

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