SharePoint 2013 vs. 2010 – Part 4 – Social Computing

SharePoint 2013 provides several key enhancements and additions to the My Site environment. The new user interface simplifies navigation among different parts of the site, and provides features that should be intuitive and familiar, especially to those who’ve used social networking sites.

Here are some of the new and enhance features:

New features

Enhanced features

1. New Simple user interface: The new My Site user interface provides a unified design that makes it easier to move around the different pages of the site. A Quick Launch column lets you move among My Site pages quickly. My Site Quick Launch improvements include:
   1. “What’s New” link takes you to your newsfeed.
   2. “Documents” link takes you to your personal document library. You can also display a list of documents that you’re following, or the list of documents other people have shared with you.
   3. View a list of tasks, people and sites that you’re following, or click “About Me” to update your user profile.
   4. “Blog” link takes you to a list of your existing blogs. If you have no existing blogs, this link takes you to a page where you can start a new blog.
   5. “Edit Links” is a new customizable area of the Quick Launch in which you can add links to other lists from your My Site or to lists from other SharePoint sites.
2. Microblogging feature: This features allows you to engage in a threaded conversation from the MySite (similar to Facebook and twitter). You can start a public conversation, where everyone in your organization can view and respond to your posts, or start a conversation with people you exclusively invite to participate.
   1. Use @mention to comment on other people’s activities and bring attention to their ideas. In turn, people learn about you and your ideas when you get @mentioned.
   2. Apply hashtags to conversation items. You can click hashtags in your newsfeed to show a search results page that has all conversations that include that hashtag.
   3. Share entire conversations using “Copy link to thread.” For example, suppose you have a conversation in your newsfeed you think a colleague would find especially interesting. You can send that person a link and enable them to view the entire conversation.
   4. “Like” posts in your newsfeed. People following you see posts you found interesting in their newsfeeds. You can view your “Likes” later and find these posts again.
   5. Include pictures and links in your conversations.
3. Local Sync (SharePoint Workspace): You can now synchronize files in your documents library to a local Windows folder, giving you direct access to your My Site documents from your file system. Syncing to a local folder also gives you access to your documents when you’re offline; updates automatically sync to the server whenever you go back online.
4. Simplified feature to store and share documents: SharePoint Online 15 Technical Preview simplifies the procedures for storing and sharing documents:
   1. You can now store all documents in a single library. This takes the place of sorting documents into either a “Shared Documents” or “Private Documents” folder. Most importantly, in the new document library, all documents are initially private until you decide to share them. Add a document to your library, and then invite people to share the document. You simultaneously provide or deny editing rights to the document as you invite people.
   2. People you invite to share a document receive an email with a link to the document (unless you choose to not send an email with the invitation). People who are sharing the document can optionally follow it and then receive updates in their newsfeed whenever the document gets updated.
   3. You can now move documents to any other SharePoint library where you have permission to add documents. For example, you might decide to move a document you added to your My Site library to a team site library.
   4. You can view a callout by clicking an icon next to the document name. From the callout, you can start a variety of activities, such as copy document URLs, share the document with specific contacts, and move the document to another location.
   5. The library comes with a standard set of columns, such as Type, Modified, Modified By, Shared, and Name, each with a set of filtering options. For example, the Type column lets you filter documents by file type. The Shared column lets you filter documents by people with whom you’re currently sharing documents. Users can still create new views as needed.