Background

Some of you might recall that I used to post monthly or bi-monthly "Recommended Reading" lists on this blog, but I stopped doing so back in March because I simply could not keep up with all of the useful content that so many people were publishing out there. Besides, I didn't want to be the bottleneck when it came to making content recommendations, so I envisioned a solution with which the community at large can submit content recommendations and vote or comment on them in much the same way that one can do it on Digg.com. Moreover, I wanted the solution to be developed on SharePoint as a social computing application because numerous customers had already asked us how they could implement such a solution on top of their intranet based SharePoint infrastructures.

Now, after just 4 months of design and development and lots of feedback from SharePoint MVPs, Insiders (our pre-sales folks), Rangers (our consultants), User Assistance (our colleagues responsible for MSDN, TechNet, and Office Online content), and Supportability Managers (who had the same fatigue as me in trying to maintain their own lists of content recommendations), SharePointPedia 1.0 is live at the friendly URL http://sharepointpedia.com, which redirects to http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia. SharePointPedia is the very first custom developed Internet facing SharePoint based application hosted by the MSCOM Operations team. Consequently, SharePointPedia is also the first MSCOM hosted SharePoint based application that has support for Windows Live ID authentication and integration with Microsoft's "RegSys" user profile system that is used across all Microsoft.com properties.

Introducing SharePointPedia

First and foremost, SharePointPedia is not a wiki as some of you might infer from the name. :-) The best way to describe it is this excerpt from its "About Us” page:

SharePointPedia.com is a web site where people discover and share useful content about SharePoint and SharePoint related products and technologies. It’s a social computing application built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Anyone with a Windows Live ID may become a registered user and can then submit content recommendations or requests, leave comments, or just vouch for whatever they like.

Note that SharePointPedia is not a wiki. It’s a “pedia” in the sense of being a compendium of useful content, but rather than being limited by just wiki functionality, it leverages the much broader set of capabilities in SharePoint. SharePointPedia is also about community, where you can find and connect with others, who have similar interests as you or who have recommended content relevant to you.

For now, SharePointPedia does not have any wiki functionality because the priority is to accommodate recommendations of or requests for existing content (a la Digg or Del.icio.us) rather than to provide a repository of collaboratively editable content (a la Wikipedia), but because it's built on SharePoint, wiki functionality can be added in the future fairly easily where appropriate.

Setting up your user profile

SharePointPedia has been carefully designed to provide just a handful of tightly integrated features that are intuitive to use. Since this was a 1.0 effort, a few of these features , such as tag selection, may not have the polish in terms of usability that they deserve, but we plan to address them prior to adding any new features.

After pointing your browser to http://sharepointpedia.com, you will see the following home page where you can quickly browse content in several self-explanatory ways.

To submit new content or to vote or comment on existing submissions, you'll need to become a registered user. To do so, simply click on the "Sign In" button to login with your Windows Live ID and go through the following one page registration process.

Here are some clarifications for the fields that you'll need to fill out:

• User Name: This is your display name that will appear in SharePointPedia and other applications hosted in the sharepoint.microsoft.com environment.
• Avatar: URL for your profile picture. At this time, we can't support picture upload, so you'll need to store your picture elsewhere and point to it. If you don't already have a convenient place, I'd recommend Windows Live SkyDrive or Windows Live Spaces or Flickr.
• My Name: These fields are currently not displayed anywhere within SharePointPedia but could be used in the future when the People Search feature is implemented.
• Blog: URL to your blog site (if you have one).
• Personal Statement: A brief description about yourself (optional).
• Technology Interests: This field is currently not used within SharePointPedia but could be leveraged in the future when the Content Targeting feature is implemented.

This is what my User Profile currently looks like:

Submitting content

Content recommendations can be submitted via the Submit Content page snapshotted below or the bookmarklet described on that page.

Note that content articles require a URL while content requests do not, and comments are enabled by default though they can be disabled to accommodate the preference of the content owner to have comments posted only at the source location of the content, especially if it's a blog entry.

Recommending content

When you see a content item that you'd like to vouch for, simply click on the "Recommend" link to boost its ranking.

Note that you can even vouch for a specific comment as shown below, especially when it's a useful response to a content request!

A couple of other nifty features

There are two features in SharePointPedia that I am particular proud of because I haven't seen them implemented quite the same way elsewhere:

• In addition to the tags that are associated with the content upon submission, other tags can be associated via the content's comments.
• There are different levels of "recommendation power," which bump up the points ranking of a content item at different rates. The current power levels are defined as follows:
• Bronze (default): 1 point per vote
• Silver (SharePoint Community Champs): 2 points per vote
• Gold (SharePoint MVPs): 3 points per vote
• Platinum (selected Microsoft employees): 4 points per vote
• Diamond (specific Microsoft SharePoint subject matter experts): 5 points per vote

Feedback questions and ideas

We would greatly appreciate your feedback, which you can provide in any of the following ways:

• Send it via e-mail directly to "SPPfb at microsoft dot com" or post it as a comment to this blog entry.
• Submit it as a Content Request with the title prefixed with "Feedback:" on SharePointPedia, so others can vote and/or comment on it.
• Post it as a topic for discussion in either the SharePoint - Social Computing forum (if it's about technology, especially reuse or adaptability within intranet environments) or the SharePoint - Community Advancement forum (if it's about usability or adoption by the community or integration with other community resources such as blogs and forums).

I hope that you will find SharePointPedia useful, and I encourage you to contribute to it by submitting your favorite content recommendations and/or vouching for existing content submissions. Thank you!

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