SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
Summary: SharePoint 2010 supports a robust social media experience out of the box for organizations. SharePoint Online brings this approach to the cloud. Scale it enough and you have the next Facebook.
As the value of Facebook outside of learning to maintain a virtual farm or keeping virtual mobsters at bay unravels, it's become clear that social media need a trusted, solid, robust platform. As I wrote earlier this week,
It’s time for an alternative and it’s time that we demand that social media not only meet our needs but meet their own potential in personal, business, and educational markets.
While I put my money on Google to deliver such an alternative, Jason Perlow put Microsoft at the top of his short list for the next big thing in social media. The key, regardless of who built it, was to provide a toolkit that could be localized and sandboxed for organizations or generalized for public consumption. The platform had to be something everyone was using anyway for it to add value in schools, just as Facebook could have if the privacy concerns and noise didn't wipe out any potential it had.
Currently, SharePoint Online is a subscription service for businesses and schools (Live@Edu is built on many of its technologies). Like a locally-hosted instance of SharePoint 2010, it provides users with the capability to share pages, updates, and media and to aggregate their own social streams. It also allows users to collaborate on documents within this social structure. It's quite easy to imagine not only a free version that leverages Windows Live services, but provides a familiar and easily integrated interface for users deploying SharePoint in their organization.
Taking my musings a step further, let's imagine that some version of SharePoint can gain traction as a mainstream social media tool. Students are using it, teachers are using, parents are using it...you get the point. Now imagine that a school embraces Live@Edu, or better yet, SharePoint (or some combination thereof) and takes advantage of new federation services available from Microsoft to allow students and staff to sign into school collaboration environments with their existing personal SharePoint accounts. Obviously, this is all a bit pie in the sky, but it's a completely reasonable scenario and one that would provide safe, secure, no-nonsense interactions between students, teachers, and parents within the context of a platform that they are using already.
Will this fly? Maybe...A look at SharePoint's technologies and available out-of-the-box social functionality certainly suggests some interesting possibilities for schools (and businesses and organizations for that matter). With Microsoft now pushing the concept of SharePoint as a platform for development (and a large and growing developer ecosystem) and their scalable SharePoint Online offering, I don't think I'm that far out in left field.
Talk back and let me know if you agree.
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Talkback
Plus an iPhone Sharepoint app, an Android app and so on and on
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
Replace..maybe not..but many of Live's services compete with Facebook pretty well. Besides they are going after two different markets and since you can link your facebook with your live account you can get the best of both worlds.
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
This will fly
This school is looking at it...
You are kidding Right (getting old zdnet)
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
exactly...that is why embracing social networking for schools and even businesses is a good thing. It allows for an individual to work in a more relaxed and every day atmosphere that they can relate to. Not the rigid file servers and emailing back and forth and IM. Puts every type of communication tool at their fingertips in one easy(er) to use interface.
Now if Microsoft and SharePoint can provide these tools to schools and businesses with some level of Admin control so they can assist their end users and if there is ever a problem they can manage it on the back end then I am all for it.
I have SharePoint 2007 services and so far our users like it better than traditional methods of sharing documents and collaboration.
So far Live@Edu has been a hit as well with our teachers as you can read in my posts below.
I think you have to work in education to understand where Microsoft is going with this. I, along with many other schools that I work with, are all looking forward to what this brings to our future.
You gotta be kidding
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
actually I do not think you understand.
Social networking has been a topic in education across the united states for the past couple years. The problem was sites like FaceBook and MySpace could not offer everything a school or even a business needs. I believe Microsoft has a product that can do that.
Get all of the good and none or very little of the bad if you know what I mean. See my post below for more information.
But Google and Facebook are to be trusted?
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
Currently Live@Edu has given my High School the ability to provide secure email to our students and opened up avenues of communication between students and teachers that were not possible before. In the past we had students email teachers their homework or just some general information and frequently they would forget to tell the teacher who they are. The teacher could not tell who the student was from their private email most of the time because they would use email addresses like JohnnyBravo@yahoo.com or whatever. This made it easy for teachers to email students using their ID numbers and now students can email staff and save files online and access them from anywhere.
I for one am very excited about the SharePoint Online and Office Web Apps enhancements coming to Live Services.
For once I agree with Chris Dawson...
But you seem to be on the right track with this post. Microsoft is once again, way ahead of the competition. While most players are desperately trying to build web apps from scratch to provide a front end to new web services, Microsoft is the only company with the sense to realize that everything doesn't have to be built on the web. We don't need web apps. We need desktop apps that integrate with web services and utilize our always-on high-speed connections to simplify our lives.
Sharepoint is the service that will make that seamless data integration a reality. Since by and large, social networking is about exposing our data to others, it makes sense to build a social network around the service we use to store and share data between our own devices and apps.
It also makes sense to build a social network around an enterprise class product. Businesses rely on Sharepoint for its security and flexibility. Consumers want the same assurance that their data is secure and that they can share certain information with only certain people.
Microsoft is a new company with vision and clarity about converging technologies to simplify people's lives. It's an exciting time to be watching Microsoft.
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
As soon as someone says it can't be done there are at least 10 other people already building it. Lead, follow, or get out of the way
Oh great!
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
I have a side business of training people in the areas of film budgeting, film production management, etc. As with any business, including the business side of convincing students that your institution is worth the tuition, I need to reach out extensively into the film community over a large geographical area (Canada and the USA). It entails blasting far and wide, thus the big need to know social marketing techniques with Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. Once the "students" enroll over the internet (usually they're everyday working people trying to enter into film production or expand their skill base in that environment) I deliver either in person in their geographical area, or through live webinars (I call it "Live On-Line Training") which I record and make available with password protection. So, Sharepoint seems to be more a way of organizing and delivering than promoting/networking.
Hopefully, I have missed your vision and I am happy to be corrected.
BTW, if anyone knows of simplified ways to do live webcasts (as opposed to webinars) I would love to hear about it.
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
You have to use it to understand. If you combine the services of Microsoft Live/Live@Edu with SharePoint then you can see the whole picture. There are many parts to sharepoint and even with SharePoint 2007 users can have a "MySite" which they can create with information about them and pictures and then add private and public document libraries, links, and information to share within their corporate network. So if you think about it SharePoint does do some of the Social Networking aspects albeit a bit differently than Facebook is doing it. Microsoft and Sharepoint along with its cloud services like Live and Live@Edu are focusing on the "productive" side of social networking instead of the farmville, Mafia Wars, and joining every useless group or fan page of social networking.
Maybe
I haven't known Microsoft to be creative enough to figure that out, but they could surprise me and I certainly don't want to under-estimate the smart people there. But in truth I'm more optimistic about that group of college students trying to create an open platform.
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
Keep talking Moodle and Google Docs...you seem to get that right most of the time......
LOL
Such words don't go in the same fragmented sentence with Sharepoint.
I'll choose alternatives that a) run on multiple platforms, b) are open source, c) have no licensing costs, and d) have free documentation and technical manuals.
RE: SharePoint 2010: There's your Facebook alternative
Have you tried it. We used Free OpenSource Alternatives to try and piece together and accomplish a fraction of what Sharepoint does when combined with MS Office, Exchange/Outlook, and Office Communicator. The comparison was day and night.
Did our internal setup cost some money. Yes it did. Does it work as it is supposed to. Yes it does. Can't say that with some of the alternatives out there. Spent more time trying to make it work than actually using it. With Microsoft and Sharepoint it was literally set up, click off a few settings and integrate with active directory and walla. Before we had users calling for support on how to do this and that and those calls have dropped dramatically and now my time is more free.
If they can bring some of that functionality to Live@Edu and allow it to communicate with Sharepoint services within the organization then I am all for it.
If you can achieve the same with your open source alternatives then good for you.