The focus of this chapter was to introduce you to My Sites and the social networking features provided by SharePoint Server 2010.

We recommend that you take some time exploring the concepts and features examined in this chapter, particularly setting up colleagues, team members, and sharing content through your personal site. The more you practice, the easier it will get and you will quickly begin to reap the benefits of My Sites' functionality.

The described social element of My Sites only works if a team, group, or entire organization is managing the profile information, and tagging content. There is not much value if only a few people are using this functionality, not just in the updates, but also the information discovery process with SharePoint's search.

One of the best ways for this functionality to gain traction is for senior management to use this functionality to communicate to their team. This is to use the functionality, rather than tell their team how to use the social networking functionality. In short, we must all be social!

We have seen that once some traction begins in one department, the user uptake is viral and very quick, and a tipping point occurs where everyone is tagging content, adding colleagues, and micro blogging. Once this occurs, the value of SharePoint will go to a new level because a lot of knowledge in an organization is not stored in documents, but is sitting in cubicles and walking around corridors. The people element of information has become engrained into the technology.

We recommend that if possible you review the My Site functionality with the human resources department, and have the update profile process become part of the new employee initiation.

All of SharePoint's functionality has now been discussed in the previous chapters. This includes Sites, Lists, Libraries, Workflows, and web parts. The next three chapters explain how and where to apply these functionalities to your organization and to roles within your organization.