I got few cracks on my forehead, when I received a challenge to come up with a solution to have a Open Social platform within my company. It should provide,
- Social features (Profile, Wall, Subscriptions, two way integration with FB & TW and so forth)
- Privacy features for activities
- Solution has to be ugly, to fit inside SharePoint twenty ten.
- Should be a single sign-on solution through Active Directory.
- There will be “user” as persona, and departments, special interest groups & projects will be non-persona users, all can subscribe each others activity feeds
- Future proof (work on mobile & tablets, integrate with outlook)
I see challenges here as,
- Complexity of data structure of relationships & limitation of RDBMS database to cop with redundancy of wall posts & subscriptions
- Fit inside SharePoint 2010
- It should be faster than real FaceBook & Twitter within a controlled environment (Internet & Intranet)
- Connect with existing apps running in my company (Information system, Payroll, HRMS, CRM & Corporate site), and take part in social features
SharePoint 2010 already has a Social feature & those are decent, but SharePoint 2010 itself is poor at handling these types of complex data, SharePoint is better in other use-cases. For publishing, work-flows. And, to cater above functions & connecting other systems would be an additional layer to write complex data connectors to pump-in & pump-out large data.
In my next post, I would try to ease complexity of the given requirements.
