Communities

SharePoint 2010 Communities: Work Together Effectively
As part of the 2010 release, SharePoint Communities provides a comprehensive, flexible platform that empowers people to work together in ways that are most effective for them. Allow your people to collaborate in groups, share knowledge and ideas, connect with colleagues, and find information and experts naturally.

Work Together the Way You Want
The global workforce of the twenty-first century is more diverse than ever. Connect and engage all of your employees with a flexible collaboration platform and a diverse set of tools that range from Wikis to Workflows to Workspaces—allowing people to work together the way they want.

Rely on a Secure Collaboration Platform
Let your IT staff rely on an enterprise-ready collaboration platform that is secure and easy to manage and will support your organization’s growing needs. SharePoint 2010 makes social safe with granular security and privacy controls, centralized management and policy setting, and robust reporting and analysis.

Extend the Value of Your Community Solutions
The SharePoint platform seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Microsoft Business Productivity infrastructure, including the Office applications, Exchange Server, Office Communications Server, SQL Server, and Dynamics. In addition, SharePoint provides Business Connectivity Services and adheres to open standards and protocols, making it easy to integrate third-party applications.

Featured Functionality

• People Profiles - People profile pages contain rich information about employees; including a bio, job title, location, contact information, interests and skills, and previous projects.  This makes finding the right people and subject matter experts across the company much easier.  With SharePoint Search, you can see the results sorted by social distance, and you can filter by job title or department.
• Photos & Presence - Everywhere you see a person's name, you also see a photo and presence status.  This helps to personalize business communities, making identification and connections among people effortless.  Tight integration with Microsoft United Communications tools allows one-click communications directly from SharePoint.
• Status Updates - Status Updates is a great, informal way to let people know where you are and what you're doing.  These status updates will also appear in your colleagues' network feeds.
• Ask Me About - Identifying expertise within a large organization can be difficult.  The Ask Me About section on a user's profile is a great way for people to not only select their areas of expertise, but also to invite their colleagues to share in their knowledge.
• Note Board - The Note Board is a great way to post comments, ask questions, or otherwise interact with people or site communities.  It can help to lower barriers to participation, relieve e-mail overload, and open up communications to multiple people.
• Recent Activities - The Recent Activities feed on a person's profile page is a helpful way to understand what that person has been working on.  This can give others deeper insight into what's going on across the company and help to build a more connected community.
• Organization Browser - With a rich Microsoft Silverlight user interface, the Organization Browswer provides an exceptional browsing experience.  It allows people to navigate smoothly through organizational structures to see peers, direct reports, and management chains.
• Add colleagues - Adding people to your enterprise social network is simple through the Add Colleagues feature, which supports privacy options.  You also can add colleagues to your immediate team or to specific groups.
• Social Bookmarks - Social Bookmarks are not only a great way to track your favorite sites, but also to share them with colleagues.  With Social Bookmarks, you can discover new sites from colleagues with similar interests. 
• Tags - Tags, or keywords, help to classify and organize the vast amount of information in your organization.  SharePoint 2010 supports a centralized tag taxonomy system as well as social tagging, which both allows users to specify their own terms an dprovides suggestions on commonly used keywords.
• Tag Clouds - SharePoint 2010 includes a Tag Cloud web part that helps people navigate through the tag taxonomy by visually depicting the most popular tags.
• Tag Profiles - Tag Profile pages are communities of interest around a specific keyword or topic.  These community sites include a list of items - such as documents, sites, or people - that have been tagged with the term, making it easy to find relevant content and people.  Tag Profile pages also contain a list of community members and any discussions or postings that appear on the community's Note Board, which can encourage participation and foster a sense of connectedness.
• My Network - What's New with My Network displays a real-time feed of updates from the people you follow and the interest and activties you track.  This helps you stay connected and up-to-date on the people and topics you care about.
• Blogs - SharePoint 2001 includes enhanced blog functionality, with a new user interface and improved commenting, editing, and content management features.  The rich text editor includes the Ribbon UI and supports easy image uploads and rich formatting.
• Wikis - Creating, editing, and managing wiki pages is easier than ever in SharePoint 2010.  Rich visual editing tools and inline multimedia support help to bring your pages to life.  SharePoint pages combine the ease of wiki editing with the deep functionality of Web Parts.
• Enterprise Wikis - Enterprise Wikis are built on the SharePoint publishing framework to support scalability and security, while also encouraging a collaborative content management process through a wiki interface.  Enterprise Wikis can help to consolidate company-wide information into a centralized, easy-to-mange repository.
• Ratings - SharePoint 2010 include a 5-star rating system that can be applied to SharePoint pages, lists/libraries, or individual documents.  Ratings help to apply quality management controls so that users can search and sort for the best content. 
• Colleague & Keyword Suggestions - Based on e-mail communication patterns, SharePoint community memberships, Microsoft Office Communicator contacts, and deep semantic analysis of e-mail messages, SharePoint 2010 suggest appropriate colleagues to add to your social network as well as relevant topics of interest or expertise.  This automated suggestion service can help to keep your network and interests updated in a seamless, natural way.