Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By : Adrian Colquhoun
Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By: Adrian Colquhoun

Overview of this book

The power of Microsoft SharePoint as the Enterprise collaboration platform is ever-growing; due to the wide range of capabilities it offers, SharePoint 2010 can help transform your business so you can quickly respond to the changes and challenges that you face. For End Users, SharePoint helps you and your team work "better, faster, and smarter". This book will take your SharePoint knowledge further, showing you how to use your skills to solve real business problems. While many other titles might be characterized as "SharePoint Explained", this cookbook contains advanced content that goes beyond that found in other SharePoint End User offerings: it is "SharePoint Applied". It provides recipes walking Power Users through a range of collaboration, data integration, business intelligence, electronic form, and workflow scenarios, as well as offering three invaluable business scenarios for building composite applications. The cookbook begins by providing a comprehensive treatment of SharePoint essentials, while quickly moving forward to topics like Data Integration, Business Intelligence, and automating business processes. At the end of the book, the information presented in the earlier recipes is combined to create three example SharePoint 2010 "composite applications" for Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Project Management. Composite applications are the "unique selling point" of SharePoint 2010 and understanding how to create them is the key to unlocking the business value of the product.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Tracking colleagues using my My Site


Before SharePoint, knowing who was doing what in an organization was really difficult. Now SharePoint can keep track of your colleagues automatically. This recipe shows you how.

Getting ready

This recipe requires your My Site. The recipe works for:

  • SharePoint 2010 Standard Edition

  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition

  • SharePoint 2010 Online (Office 365 Edition)

My Site must be configured and active in the SharePoint installation.

How to do it...

  1. Open your My Site and navigate to the My Profile page.

  2. Select the Colleagues tab.

  3. Click on the Add Colleagues link.

  4. In the dialog displayed, enter the names of the colleagues you wish to add. You can choose if you want to add them to My Team and organize them into different groups. Adding colleagues to your team allows them to see more information from your user profile.

  5. When you have added all the colleagues that you need, click on the OK button.

  6. Your new colleague is now shown on your Colleagues tab and you can view their My Site by clicking on their name.

How it works...

SharePoint 2010 allows you to track your team members, colleagues, and subject matter experts through your My Site. When you add a colleague, you can add them to different groups such as My Team. Adding colleagues to your team will allow them to access more information from your user profile.

Once you have added a colleague, SharePoint will automatically keep you up-to-date with their activity. This includes the changes that they make to their user profiles, the content that they author, the pages that they tag, and their status message updates. All this information will be displayed on your My Newsfeed page when you again access your My Site. SharePoint will also send you e-mails to tell you about important changes and will even suggest colleagues to you based on its analysis of the colleagues you already have, and the people that they have added to their networks.

By tracking colleagues in this way, SharePoint helps you build up strong and effective networks within your organization. You can then leverage these networks to get your work done more effectively.

Tip

The track colleagues functionality wasn't invented by Microsoft to help you stalk "that pretty little thing from accounts". Using it for that purpose will almost certainly land you in a lot of trouble. Don't do it!

See also

  • Creating and accessing my My Site

  • Updating my user profile

  • Viewing the SharePoint sites I am a member of

  • Tagging a SharePoint page so I can find it again later

  • Creating a blog in my My Site, Chapter 5