Social and Collaboration Features in SharePoint 2013

Social and Collaboration features in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint Server 2013 implements features that make enterprise social computing and collaboration easier. Social networking tools such as My Sites and social content technologies such as blogs, wikis, and newsfeeds etc.

Note: To use the Social networking feature we need to have Users Profile, My Sites and Distributed Cache Service configured. Anonymous posting is not supported in any Microblogging feature in SharePoint Server 2013

If organization don’t want to use the Social collaboration feature then they can remove the web part for Social Collaboration from the sites.

Below are the Terms and definitions for Microblogging, Newsfeeds.

Term Definition
Feed or Newsfeed A feed is a generic term that is used to refer to a container of conversation and activities. Special purpose feeds exist, such as the Likes view or the Consolidated Feed, where these feeds show different views or filtered views of conversations and activities. For example, the Likes view shows all items liked by the user. The Activities view, shows all activities, such as following a person, posts or replies performed by the user.
User Activity A user activity is a post or reply originating from a user, and not a system-generated post or reply.
Following Following refers to a user-initiated action that indicates a user’s interest in a specific document, person, site, or tag. When a user follows an item, new activities about that item appear in the user’s newsfeed on the user’s My Site.
Mentions When members post or reply to threads, they can tag other users by mentioning them. A mention takes the form of an at symbol (@) and the user’s name. The user profile service returns a list of names that match the member’s input. When users are mentioned, the users receive an activity in their My Site newsfeed that alerts them to the mention.
Tags When members post or reply to threads, they can tag words by using hash tags. A hash tag takes the form of a number symbol (#) and the corresponding words that the member wants to include in the tag. The managed metadata service returns a list of terms that match the member’s input. When a post contains tags, the newsfeed displays an activity related to that tag, and any users who follow that tag see the activity in their newsfeed.
Notifications A notification is a system-generated email that notifies a user of an activity occurring on a thread they contributed to, or notifying the user that someone has started following him or her, or notifying the user that someone has mentioned him or her.
Entity An entity is a person, document, tag, or site. Entities can be followed.
Likes view The Likes view is a feed of activities liked by the user
Activities view The Activities view is a feed showing all posts, replies and likes made by the user
Mentions view The Mentions view is a feed showing all messages where the user was mentioned.
Everyone view The Everyone view is the feed with all activities from all users.
Site feed The site feed is a feed scoped to a particular group of users. The site feed is a feature on a team site. Security trimming applies to site feeds.
Consolidated feed The consolidated feed is a feed that contains threads from entities a user is following. By default, the consolidated feed displays 20 items and is ordered in reverse chronological order. This is the default view of the newsfeed shown on the user’s My Site.

The newsfeed (or just simply the feed) displays activity information to users. Users access the feeds from a user’s My Site. The different feeds available to users from their My Sites include the following:

· Newsfeed   This is the default view when visiting a user’s My Site. The Newsfeed contains recent activities from followed entities. The Newsfeed displays 20 items and is sorted in reverse chronological order.

· Everyone   The Everyone feed shows the last 20 posts or replies across all users. The distinction between the Everyone feed and the Newsfeed is that the Newsfeed only shows activities from entities the user is following.

· Activities   The Activities feed shows all activities associated with a user, including system-generated activities. The Activities feed represents the most accurate view of a user’s activities because it shows all activities and not just recent activities, which occurs with the Newsfeed. This feed is also seen when users browse to their profile or About Me page for a user.

· Mentions   The Mentions feed for a user displays all posts or replies where that user was mentioned.

· Likes   The Likes feed displays a list of posts or replies that the user has liked. This is not related to the I Like It feature from SharePoint Server 2010