MOSS from a personal point of view
A “me-centred” experience
Much has been written about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) as a collaboration and content management server, pulling together disparate systems onto one single platform. However, MOSS also comes with some powerful tools that will prove invaluable to organisations in the future. These will allow you to personalise your intranet or internet-facing websites.
What is personalisation?
Put simply, personalisation is allowing your users to consume the content your site contains in ways that are relevant to them – they no longer have to “learn” the best way to find information. Personalisation done well allows your users the ability to individualise the way they view and use data, documents and activities of other users. It also allows you to make informed decisions about what your audiences are looking for and target key content to them.
Having it your way
MOSS has a number of tools that help you personalise content. At its most basic level, users can sign in to a MOSS website and, while interacting with the site, provide information which is then reused to drive personalisation – for example, their location. This information can be used in a number of ways.
- Through Forms Server you can take the pain out of form filling. Instead of providing the same information again and again you can pre-fill forms with information already known about you.
- You can provide personalised search results to ensure that users get the most relevent results to their searches.
- MOSS can use this data to collect users into “audiences” and those audiences can be targeted with specific content.
Using Social Networking
At its most advanced, MOSS has tools for intranet environments which will provide “social networks” which mine your internal systems – for example, your emails – and build up a picture of who is important to you. This can then be used to drive further personalisation based on information specific to you and the people you work with. Through its ‘colleagues’ functionality, MOSS makes social networking easy.
Using Rich People information
MOSS makes it easy for applications to show rich information about a person, wherever they are referenced. This means that instead of just getting someone’s name on a web page or a document, you get a picture, details as to whether they are free or busy, the option to chat/call, and a link to their personal website. And even better, you get this same functionality whether you are using a MS Office client like “Word” or viewing information on a browser.
How to personalise
The following features enable personalisation through MOSS:
- Profile Store: Stores user-specific information
- Targeting: This tool is used showing information to groups based on data in the Profile Store
- Colleagues: Provides social networking capabilities
- Server Discovery: Used in Windows Client applications to show personalised information from the server
These are highlights from Ben Robb's presentation at the Microsoft European SharePoint conference in Berlin, 12 - 14 February 2007.