Webworld Technologies

There were two mind-bogglingly cool features that stood out for me in @venkyv’s great talk today at the SharePoint 2009 conference, on the social networking & MySite features of SharePoint 2010. 

One of those is this:  An experimental feature of SharePoint 2010 is integrating in data from your source control repository into MySite.  Meaning, instead of just “friending” other employees, one could be a “friend” of source files or projects, so that if files change in those projects, that you can be notified, can discuss them, etc.

I don’t know about you, but SVN has saved my butt more times than I can count.  However, unfortunately, many of those “save my butt” moments has happened way after the fact – where a silly change was published that broke everything, or where someone mistakenly commits a change that breaks something, and then the files are then published a month later and everyone looks around in bewilderment as “I haven’t touched the site in months!!”. 

Well, if you were to integrate social alerts & discussion into your SVN or other version control system, you could then nip these problems in the bud – big time.  One could get an instant alert when a change is made to a project you’re working on, and then could discuss this with the person if there was inadequate information in their commit log.

Or, how about taking the concept MUCH bigger, and using SharePoint for external sites, and using it to manage major open-source projects with an open-access SVN repo.  Brilliant!

In talking with @venkyv after the talk, he said that the feature is still in initial work & testing, but by all means – it has my vote, and I hope it makes it into the RTM version of SharePoint 2010! 

* Whoa – SP2010 can be used as a drop-in replacement for social media measurement and handling using tag-based social bookmarking combined with workflow

At a breakout session at the SharePoint 2009 conference, one that is going over the new Web Analytics features in SharePoint 2010.  

My first impression of the stats package for SharePoint was sort of a “finally!” so that there could be some means of seeing if people were using your SharePoint site without having to go to web logs or some sort of 3rd-party analytics package.  But then, after the analytics break-out session, it became pretty apparent to me that this was a real powerful “sleeper” feature that is really a lot more important and profound than most anyone else besides someone like Avinash Kaushik might think. 

First of all, yes – it will be nice for content stewards and IT managers to be able to use the new build-in analytics package to tell if people are logging on to their SharePoint site or not.  However, the value is a bit deeper here, and that is that SharePoint – by original design – is a distributed content platform, where the people who really care whether or not content is being viewed is the people who created the content themselves, or the content stewards that really want to make sure that the information is being distributed around the company. 

In addition to the reporting console features that admins can use, there is also an analytics web part that can then be packaged back into the site, and can be used to highlight popular tags, highly-rated files, and other such analytics data, which can then be visible for all SharePoint users.

Making this sort of analytical data broadly available then enhances and drives the whole SharePoint ecosystem within the company, as then everyone can rapidly see what sorts of things are popular, or what sorts of things are being searched for a lot which they have information for.

The presenter at this breakout had a nice slide that depicted the phenomena: