OK, before we get started, let me admit up front that it is totally unfair to pick on My Sites at this point. My Sites are, after all, a feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. We are now well into 2009, and most of us are now eagerly anticipating the first public beta of SharePoint 14 SharePoint Server 2010. The features set I am about to bash was probably drawn up on a white board in Redmond back in 2005. Social networking has evolved and matured dramatically in the intervening years. It's completely unreasonable to expect My Sites to be a perfect tool for corporate social networking at this point in their evolution and I have every expectation that the next version of SharePoint will introduce a radically improved user experience.
All that being said, I found myself bristling a bit recently when I stumbled across the blog post of SharePoint MVP Liam Cleary, entitled My Sites - Market Yourself!! I probably could have breezed by this bit of SharePoint pandering if only Liam had not punctuated the title with not just one, but two exclamation points!! Instead, this overly emphatic call to action drew me in and reminded me of every disappointing experience I've ever had with my My Site. As I read through Liam's comprehensive enumeration of the features and capabilities of SharePoint My Sites, I ground my teeth regretting every minute I ever put into personalizing and populating my personal SharePoint portal. Grrrr! My Sites suck!
Before moving forward, I should say that while I am taking tongue-in-cheek issue with this particular post, I am decidedly a fan of Liam and his writing. I read his blog regularly and highly recommend it as a source of high quality and insightful information about SharePoint.
Back to the bashing. I think that what got my dander up was the implication I drew from the title that if you, as a SharePoint end user, are not investing time in maintaining your My Site, you are failing to market yourself within your organization. Having invested significant time in polishing a My Site, and having never seen a return on these efforts, I would be eager to argue this point. My contention is that the current iteration of My Sites has some fundamental flaws that doom the system to failure. What I would like to do with this post is suggest some alternative approaches and do some brainstorming around future solutions.
Fundamental Flaws
- The name "My Site" is lame and somehow condescending. I understand how cute and rational it must sound in a presentation to the CIO; talking about all of the eager employees busily personalizing their very own Web pages. But this Web page isn't "My" site, this is my user profile at WORK. Even if I can choose a colorful theme and put up links to Dilbert cartoons, maintaining this Web page isn't something I would do except for the fact that it's part of my job. I for one would feel better about the whole thing if we could just call them "Profile Pages" or something more generic and drop the whole passive aggressive marketing spin.
- Too hard to personalize. In my opinion, this is the issue that killed My Space and has fueled the incredible growth at Facebook. To rock a MySpace profile, you need to basically hack MySpace and edit raw HTML. By comparison, creating a Facebook profile is as simple as filling out a form. To get people to create and maintain robust personal profiles, it has to be ridiculously easy. If we're asking users to choose, add and configure Web Parts to create a basic user profile, it's just not going to work. Many employees can't do it and most just don't care enough to make the effort.
- Standardization. Out-of-the-box, users can do whatever they want with a My Site. Although that sounds empowering, it's really more of a problem. If everybody's profile is different, it becomes an annoyance to have to search a colleagues' My Site for the links or contact information that I need. It becomes much worse if some colleagues use certain functionality but others don't. For example, if half of my co-workers have deleted the My Calendar Web Part from their My Site, it won't be long before I stop looking at My Sites as a source of information about availability. To be effective, I think we need pretty structured, organization-specific templates to be applied to My Sites.
- Search Doesn't Work. I honestly don't know, maybe this is just a problem on the Bamboo Solutions portal, but it doesn't seem like any content on My Sites has been indexed. Even when I'm looking for basic contact information, typing a colleagues' name into the big search box at the top of our corporate portal never seems to return a My Site as a link. I'm sure there's just some basic configuration that needs to be done here, but if these things don't generate robust search results, they're definitely worthless.
- Status is absent. The single most important feature driving the adoption of Twitter and Facebook is the status message. What are you doing right now? Like most 40-somethings, I'm still not quite comfortable assuming that other people care "I'm glad it's sunny today" or "I'm standing in line at Starbucks", but status is here to stay. And I honestly believe that there is a very useful place for status in the workplace. I do think there are productivity gains and synergies to be had by letting my co-workers know, "I'm working on Project X" or "I'm trying to figure out how to do Task Z". Microsoft Communicator has incorporated status in the instant messaging client; it would be nice to synch up that status with my SharePoint profile.
This is a thorny problem though. At the end of the day, I refuse to maintain more than one status. I just don't have the bandwith to Tweet, write pithy / cute Facebook status messages AND maintain a "professional" status for the workplace. I believe this suggests that we need some integration of Twitter and/or Facebook with the workplace profile. I don't pretend to have figured this out completely. It's limiting enough that my Facebook status is now written with the knowledge that my mother will read it. Things will get even worse when I know that my boss and all of my co-workers will see it as well. However, that's probably the reality we're headed for.
- Lack of integration with existing social networks. Social networking is one of those things where you need a lot of people to play for it to work. On that basis alone, I'm skeptical that viable social networks can be formed outside of the largest organizations. You need thousands of users updating profiles, status messages and contributing to the network to keep it interesting. A company with even a few thousand employees may find that there just isn't enough critical mass for an active social network to form.
I think that a way around this problem is to build the corporate social network on the back of established systems. In my mind, the ideal integration would be with LinkedIn. Why? The LinkedIn network already exists. Better still, the LinkedIn network has already established a professional context. For the user, there is a compelling value proposition for keeping your list of skills and experience up-to-date that outweighs the downside risk of co-workers hitting you up with questions and favors based on expertise. I have formally submitted a request to LinkedIn for access to their closely held API in hopes that Bamboo could build a nice SharePoint/LinkedIn Mashup... but so far, no love from LinkedIn. Maybe it's time to look at OpenSocial.
- Data that should be automated isn't. I don't know exactly where you draw the line here, but there is some basic information my company already has about me that I shouldn't have to re-enter into my MySite. Whether it's job title, office number, or where I fit in the company org chart, we ought to be able to give users more of a running start
Now What Do We Do?
Ok, that's all very nice. I'm locked into SharePoint and I'm now convinced that My Sites suck, what am I supposed to do? Should I just completely give up on the promise of social networking in the enterprise? Should I sit on my hands and hope that Microsoft has this all figured out in SharePoint Server 2010?
I have a few answers, some of them self serving, others less so. First...
If you're running WSS 2.0, but have been contemplating an upgrade just so you can roll out My Sites, you might want to rethink. Bamboo offers a simple but powerful user profile system for WSS that will give you all the functionality you need at a fraction of the cost. Check out the User Profile Plus Web Part as an alternative. [Yes, this was one of the self serving answers]
I don't know enough about the product to formally recommend it, but I've seen some very interesting things written about NewsGator's Social Sites. We'll see if we can get a guest blog from the team at NewsGator to talk about how their solution addresses my complaints with My Sites.
Comment on this post. Let Bamboo know about the functionality you want in your SharePoint portal. We are very actively looking at this feature set. As always, your input will help shape the products we build to address these issues.
More on My Sites
In the course of writing this post I came across some other articles and resources that may be of interest if you are thinking about My Sites:
Posted
Apr 16 2009, 02:53 PM
by
Steve Gaitten
My name is Steve Gaitten, I am Director of Online Operations at Bamboo. My primary mission is to make Bamboo Nation the most useful SharePoint community site on the web. I am also focused on ensuring a world class shopping experience for customers who visit the Bamboo Solutions Online Store. Prior to Bamboo, I spent over a decade at America Online. At AOL my most recent roles included Director of Product Management in the Messaging & Social Media division as well as Managing Editor of AOL Money & Finance. I am a patented inventor, a bad golfer, an enthusiastic horticulturalist and a dog lover.