A Community Organizer for SharePoint Social Communities

One of the more powerful basic capabilities of Social Sites 2010 is the Communities feature, which creates a focused setting where both internal and external stakeholders can collaborate for a common, often highly specific, purpose. Social Sites 2010 makes it easy to create, join and recommend communities and now, we’re making it even easier to keep them organized.

In many organizations, communities develop a natural hierarchy as sub-groups develop, like for a multi-phased project. Keeping track of activities relevant to particular communities could be a challenge as the community structure becomes more complex. That’s where the Community Roll-Up feature in Social Sites 2010 comes in handy.

The community activity stream in Social Sites 2010 now has two settings: “Rollup Child Communities” and “Exclude Child Communities that are not followed.” The first setting causes events from communities situated at a lower level in the SharePoint site structure (the Child community) to be displayed on the activity stream of a “Parent” community sitting at a higher level in the structure. The second setting lets the community determine whether to display all sub-community activity or have it limited to only those SharePoint social communities being actively followed. There are no limits to the number of levels that can be rolled up and sub-communities with their own sub-communities (hey, it happens) can enable the feature to roll up events from those groups as they see fit.

With these capabilities, a community can keep its activity stream both comprehensive and relevant, helping members stay productive and avoid information overload. Also, because Social Sites 2010 runs as a native service on SharePoint, the new roll-up capabilities inherit enterprise-class security features. For instance, a member of a parent SharePoint community lacking access privileges to a sub-community will not see activity events from that group, regardless of rollup settings.

As social enterprise computing broadens and matures, new challenges, like dealing with the potential information sprawl of hierarchical communities, will continue to present themselves. NewsGator will keep your organization, and its SharePoint investment, one step ahead.

So, are you noticing a rise in community sprawl in your social enterprise? If so, how are you dealing with it?