Overview of Web 2.0 Functionalities with SharePoint
Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2007 presently supports basic Wiki, Blog and RSS functions and while it is
unlikely that SharePoint Service Packs between now and the next version will change that
significantly, we can expect the next version to expand SharePoint's native Web 2.0 capabilities in
many areas. However, the following summary outlines what Web 2.0 enhancements are available
for SharePoint in form of extensions and add-ons today. In many cases these were developed by
Microsoft Product Team members, on the Office and SharePoint teams and made available to the
public.
Web 2.0 Introduction & Overview (all data points are based on Forrester Research as of 03/2008)
The term Web 2.0 is not really clearly defined and often used to describe any socially targeted web
based functionality that often is still in its infancy today or just starting to experience wider user
adoption. O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 as harnessing collective intelligence rather than individual ones
where data is the next 'Intel inside'. It is characterized as the "perpetual beta" where lightweight
programming models support innovation in assembly with a focus of device-independent content
delivery combined with a rich user experience. In summary Web 2.0 generally focuses on user
empowerment and reduced IT department involvement. This is a fundamental premise on which
SharePoint itself is built, so we can expect to see more from SharePoint in this aspect going forward.
Most organizations that talk about Web 2.0 or social networking functionality usually mean the
following areas. The numbers reflect the percentages of companies investing, piloting, or not using
these particular functions:
Instant Messaging (investing: 55%, piloting: 30%, not using: 18%)

Podcasting (investing: 30%, piloting: 16%, not using: 4%)

Blogs (investing: 29%, piloting: 18%, not using: 8%)

Social Networking (investing: 28%, piloting: 20%, not using: 6%)

RSS (investing: 28%, piloting: 16%, not using: 3%)

Wikis (investing: 26%, piloting: 15%, not using: 5%)

What these numbers show is that most companies have generally realized there are productivity
gains to be realized from these emerging technologies and employees demand them in their work
environment. In many cases where IT departments don't deliver what users desire, they become
creative and that can pose a whole set of issues by itself. See these articles for more detail:
 Wall Street Journal Article: Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You (July 30, 2007)
 Blog on Wall Street Journal Article: Facebook Users Share Too Much (August 14, 2007)
Key Points:
Technology buyers generally view Web 2.0 technologies as strongly positive (20%), positive

44% or are neutral (29%) towards them.
 The biggest Web 2.0 adopters are: IT or IS (72%), Corporate Communication (46%), Marketing
(44%)

In business today, Web 2.0 tools are mainly used for:
"Listen To Me" (Blogs)
"Listen To Us" (Wikis)
"Fin d People Like Me" (Tagging, Profiles, Social Networks, Virtual Worlds)
"Find Stuff I Need" (Tagging, RSS, Atom Feeds)
SharePoint & Web 2.0
1. WIKIs
Definition: (Wiki, a Hawaiian word for "fast")
A wiki is software that allows users to easily create, edit, and link pages together. Wikis are often
used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are
often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.
Business Facts:
 Business Adoption: 14% piloting, 23% considering , 20% small scale implementation, 7% large
strategic investment, 36% no plans
 Business Value: Knowledge Management, Collaborative Document Creation, Collaborative
Workspaces, Lightweight Project Management
 Wikis in Business are mostly used for Content Development (i.e. Intranets like WikiPedia,
documents like proposals)
 Business Considerations: Artifacts never leave the Wiki, Users need to take additional steps to
control the content
Demo Sites:
 http://www.schoolnet.com (using the Community Kit for SharePoint )
 http://digg.com/ (bookmark links and vote + comments but no social tagging)
 http://en.wikipedia.org (fast results but no voting)
 http://qna.live.com/ (not effective for discussion)
 http://del.icio.us/ (social bookmarking of content but lacks tag subspaces specific to SharePoint)
 http://SharePointPedia.com (social computing application built on top of Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007 with .Net)
SharePointPedia.com Background
Business Problems:
 Microsoft has a lot of content on TechNet and MSDN and it is hard to find relevant information
 TechNet and MSDN spend 40+ hours over 2 week s on content planning
 PSS gets lots of calls for specific issues
 SP MVP post great blogs but visitors can't find it
SharePointPedia Features
1. Collecting Intelligence: submit new content, recommend best content, add comments to
enhance content and answer questions, add additional tags in comments
2. Browse for Content: pre-build views, browse tags (all users), browse your tags
3. Add ways to browse: Find specific information in a list or cloud view (view is based on use count
and text size)
4. Content Management:
 Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy (balance between meta noise and meta innovation)
 Controlling content (moderate or not moderate, controlling abuse)
 Help good content grow in popularity (help users find content that falls into different score
ranges)
 Keep users up to date on new content
5. Designed for Participation
 Reward - collect contribution points, point multipliers, ability to create own tags, display as
featured users
 Promote Community Champions - control content
Notes:
 SharePointPedia.com took 3 months, 1 onshore, 2 offshore developers to build
 WebPart deployment currently requires admin privileges - more granular concept (i.e. partially
trusted code) desired for future
 LiveID can be used as method of authentication for SharePoint, Live ID SDK available SharePointPedia is the first site to ever use this with SharePoint
 Uses a custom DB for content, discussions and tag as the SP DB was not designed as a platform
service, this will change with the next SP version (SQL design Considerations: need for complex
joins, performance based on size of data, ability to use hybrid approach with list event handlers)
 Community Kit for SharePoint
(http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/ContentDetails.aspx?ContentID=600)
 Forms Based Authentication in SharePoint
(http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/ContentDetails.aspx?ContentID=488)
 SharePoint Faceted Search
(http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/ContentDetails.aspx?ContentID=5)
Additional Information:
 TechNet Article: Using Blogs and Wikis in Business
 SharePoint Community Kit on CodePlex
Available Enhancements for SharePoint
The Enhanced WIKI edition 2.0 offers (besides other features):
 Support for custom wiki markup syntax/tokens such as "* bullet", "-strikethrough-*, etc.
 Page specific section titles/bookmarks and autogenerated TOC
 Support for public discussions on each wiki page
 Tool for importing content from other wikis and applications
Beta 2 (11/2007):
https://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=CKS&ReleaseId=8087
2. BLOGs
Definition (from WikiPedia):
A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse
chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a
blog
Business Facts:
 Business Value: Internal Communication (63%), Internal Knowledge and Content Management
(50%), external Thought Leadership ( 47%), Marketing to customer and prospects (46%)
 BLOGs in Business are mostly used for general communication (Executive, Reporting,
Community)
Demo Sites:
Joel Oleson's SharePoint Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/default.aspx)
Lawrence Liu's Social Networking Blog
(http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/lliu/default.aspx)
 Ian's SharePoint Blog (http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/default.aspx)
 Library of Congress Blog (http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233)
 SharePoint Community Kit Blog Demo (http://cks.wssblogs.com/)


Additional Information:
 TechNet Article: Using Blogs and Wikis in Business
 SharePoint Community Kit on CodePlex
Available Enhancements for SharePoint
The Enhanced Blog Edition (EBE) 2.0 Final Release is a SharePoint 2007 solution package which
extends the out-of-the-box blog template with the following features:
 Theming
 Modular Theme Framework (MTF) - no need to wrestle with the default blog master page start from the HTML you want and simply insert the blog content via XSL.
 SEO Friendly URL's - blog post URL's that look like /archive/2007/08/25/sharepoint-charttool.aspx instead of /Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=37
 5 very cool themes to use as-is, or to get you started on the development of your own
including dynamic per-post links (e.g. Digg this), tag cloud, etc. Check them out here
 Linkbacks (aka Trackbacks)
 Send linkbacks to other blog posts you are linking to in your EBE blog post (these show up as
trackbacks on the other blog)
 Receive linkbacks from other blogs who are posting about your blog post (these show up as
trackbacks on your EBE blog)
 Spam control
 Akismet integration to detect comment spam
 CAPTCHA to help block comment spam at the source
 Option to automatically delete spam to recycle bin
 Option to automatically approve spam-free comments
 RSS
 Custom RSS link (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/myblog)
 Post trimming (only a portion of post is sent via RSS)
 Specify RSS feed item count
 Category specific feeds (e.g. /rss.xml?cat=coolstuff)
 Validates W3C
 Miscellaneous
 Securing of system pages (e.g. so anonymous users can't browse your lists and libraries using
SharePoint UI)
 Metaweblog API to support Windows Live Writer and migration tools.
 Client Date/Time - displays date/time in time zone of user instead of server
Production Release (3/2008):
http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5134
3. RSS
Definition (from WikiPedia):
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently
updated content including, but not limited to, blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts
Business Facts:
 Business Value: Corporate Communication (76%), Content Aggregation ( 58%), Marketing to
customers (50%)
 RSS in Financial Services is used for Internet Feeds, Intranet Feeds, Content Feeds, LOB Feeds
CRM, LOB feeds ERP
Available Enhancements for SharePoint
SharePoint Community Kit on CodePlex
4. Tagging
Definition:
Social bookmarking of content
Business Facts:
 Tagging in Business is used for finding information and experts, establishing communities and
accidental learning
Demo Sites:
 http://www.wsssearch.com/tagging.html
 http://del.icio.us/
 http://www.technorati.com/
Available Enhancements for SharePoint
The Tag Cloud 1.2 offers:
 Tag Cloud web part – displaying tags in weighted format. The popular a tag is, the bigger it’s
shown.
 Tag Browser web part – displaying items associated with a tag. The order of items can be
customized.
 Related Tag Cloud web part – a tag cloud only displaying related tags co-existed with a tag.
 URL Browser web part – displaying link items sorted on number of saves. This web part is used
for social tagging/bookmarking scenario.
Released 2/2008 :
http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10648
5. Social Networking
Definition:
Communities of common interests and common attributes work together
Social Networking with MOSS
 My Sites
 Colleague Tracker, Sites and 'In Common With' (i.e. common managers, colleagues or
memberships)
 Membership web part
 Colleague Change Tracking (choose which attribute changes to track i. e. change in interests)
 Organizational Hierarchy (see My Sites of others)
 Presence
Resources:
 Matthew's Blog
 http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/matthew
 Blogs and Wikis in business
 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb400751.aspx
 Social Computing for SharePoint
http://microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/collaboration/social.mspx
 Social Networking with MOSS
 http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/488d329d-306a-436d-a9fa4b1e4037c8a61033.mspx
6. Community Kit for SharePoint
Available for free on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/cks
SharePoint Community Kit Components & Features:
 Enhanced Wiki Edition (extends core WSS wiki, per page discussion, Wiki markup (token)
support, markup help, templates for TOCs/FAQs, ability to import Wiki entries from FlexWiki, )
 Enhanced Blog Edition (posts, comments, archives, MetaWeblog API, trackbacks, Akismet spam
filtering, RSS feed validator, improved RSS support incl. category specific RSS , post trimming)
 FBA (Web parts for Membership request, login, recover password, change password / easy
configuration, place on multiple pages)
 School Edition (template for schools and education associations, provides common structure
and customizable presentation, POC avail.)
 Intranet/Extranet
 User Group Edition (standard template for user groups, common functionality, highly
customized UI - was done without custom code )
 Chatterbox (instant messaging for SharePoint build with AJAX, conversations are logged in SP
lists)
 Tag Cloud
 Taxonomy-Tagging Starter Kit (basic taxonomy mgt., content tagging, filtered views using
Content Query web part, MOSS only)
 Virtual-Earth Maps (VE Map Web part, custom PushPin DB, developed by MS IT, full source
available)
 Windows Live Authentication (support WLID authentication in SharePoint, add Windows Live ID
users to SharePoint, provides new WL user groups, manage WLID users via email address)
 World Clock and Weather (build by Bamboo Solutions, specify multiple locations, full source
avail. - calling web services, custom editor)
General Notes:
 The CKS is a free extension to SharePoint
 All components have their own installation process
 All components are managed and configured through SharePoint
 Production ready version of Enhanced Blog Edition was released on 03/04/2008 (get latest,
there were various code and API changes between the Beta and Production versions)
 Enhanced Wiki Edition:
o Discussions attached to Wiki pages are deleted together with the Wiki pages
o Discussion pages can include code snippets and design elements like tables
o Ability to create new, custom markup tags
o Ability to copy Wiki content from standard Wiki to Enhanced Wiki pages
o Beta 2.5 next week, Beta 3 due in summer (enhanced importer and exporter for Word and
OneNote, enhanced TOC - MediaWiki style, Plug-in support, improved Token and Markup
support), production release date unknown
 CKS Value Points: examples of what is possible, early adopter advantage