Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 14

Configuring User Profiles and Social Computing

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• What’s new in Enterprise Social?
• Managing and configuring user profile synchronization
• Managing and configuring My Sites
• Managing and configuring communities

Several computing megatrends are occurring in the enterprise today: cloud computing, the proliferation of mobile devices, big data, and the introduction and proliferation of enterprise social applications. As part of the “consumerization of IT,” social applications such as Facebook and Twitter, and many others, are moving from the consumer world to the enterprise. In this chapter, we use the term enterprise social to refer to the adoption of social capability applications and tools within the corporation. These enterprise social applications are increasing employee engagement, improving team collaboration, and helping solve real business challenges. Because SharePoint is a collaboration platform, it has historically provided a limited set of enterprise social features, but it’s fair to say that the feature set was incomplete relative to other applications. With the introduction of SharePoint 2013, enterprise social capability has dramatically increased, and it is now a key part of the platform. SharePoint 2013 implements features that make enterprise social computing and collaboration easier. These enterprise social features are built upon user profiles, and a database of user properties or attributes that integrate information from many kinds ...