One Newsfeed to Rule Them All Jeff C. Kelly Practice Area Lead, Intranets & Business Productivity non~linear creations

Jeff C. Kelly Practice Lead, Intranets & Business Productivity

[email protected]

647-776-2556

www.nonlinearcreations.com

www.nonlinearcreations.com/blog www.jeffkelly.com

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NLC Executive Summary • • Founded in 1995 75+ full-time specialists • • • Toronto, Ottawa, Regina, Calgary and Vancouver New York, NY Florianopolis, Brazil

Microsoft Gold Partner

NLC has been a Microsoft partner for more than 5 years. We help our clients effectively deliver their technology solutions and tap into the power of technologies to generate value for their businesses.

Microsoft FAST Certified Partner

FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary, is the leading global provider of best-in-class enterprise search technologies for the most demanding applications.

Sitecore Worldwide Partner

Sitecore has, developed content management systems which allow companies in a simple and manageable fashion to control the content of their websites and intranets while integrating with external IT systems.

Client logos, client logos everywhere | TORONTO | OTTAWA | CALGARY | REGINA | NEW YORK 4

About me Consultant, writer, blogger, speaker since the 20 th century ECM, DM, KM, Enterprise Social Computing, Forms/Workflow/Portals/EAI, Enterprise Search … Former web developer (1995-2000) Grey backgrounds, tag, rainbow horizontal dividers, “Under Construction” animated GIFs, etc.

Former SharePoint developer (2000-2007-ish) Former SharePoint solutions architect (2005-ish-2010-ish) Current challenge: managing and growing a SharePoint consulting/ implementation practice across three countries 5

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Activities, activities everywhere Twitter LinkedIn Yammer SharePoint 2010 Events Status Updates Facebook Activities Status Updates Blogs/RSS Bacn email 7

The SharePoint Activity Feed

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What did he just say?

“Microsoft: SharePoint 2013 Will Suck at Social – Get Something Else!” http://blog.furuknap.net/microsoft-sharepoint-2013-will-suck at-social-get-something-else “I would say as a customer don’t wait for Wave15, unless you’ve got a really slow social media strategy or unless you want to use some really baseline features … I would start going ahead with our platform and Newsgator on top.” --Johnathan Barrett, Microsoft Australia 9

Two classes of “followable” activities • Job Title change • Phone number • Skills, Projects, Interests, About Me, etc.

Profile Updates

• Comment on document, post, list item, etc.

• “Like”

Social Activities

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Make sure newsfeeds are enabled Activity Feed Timer Job must be enabled and scheduled New in Service Pack 1: Activity Feeds must be enabled in

User Profile Service Application



Set up My Sites

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Two feeds per person • My private feed • The things my colleagues (people I ‘followed’) are doing “Consolidated” • My actions that get broadcast to my colleagues (who followed me) “Published” 12

Why not web parts or Tweetdeck/Hootsuite ??

Lots of HTTP traffic back and forth to those public feeds URLs may be blocked by usage policies So then why is it okay to retrieve items separately and deliver them to users?

Approved list of sites/feeds (LinkedIn, not Facebook – or maybe Facebook) Depends on the reason for the policy – if it’s a bandwidth thing, our approach is great Asynchronous approach – separate server retrieves items in batches – users are reading data from your SP database, not the Web Don’t have to install/support/worry about desktop apps 13

Anatomy of a Feed ActivityManager ActivityApplication ActivityTemplate ActivityType Has a collection of ActivityEvent Is an instance of 14

Extending SharePoint’s Feeds

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Steps to inject our own Activities Register a custom ActivityApplication using a Farm-scoped Feature Register INTO this ActivityApplication a new ActivityType (‘update’ or ‘tweet’) Register users’ credentials (per user/external app) in Secure Store Deploy a Timer Job that will collect and inject Activities into users’ newsfeeds The Timer Job will call into a custom Gatherer object 16

How can we “gather” from multiple sites … … when they all have different schemas?

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THIS APPROACH ASSUMES: We are not tracking any activity other than “said” (status updates, ‘tweets’) In a non-generic (tailored connection) approach, we can specify the activity (e.g., “ Shannon Ryan created a new team site .” No matter the source (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), we are only grabbing three fields and mapping them to our generic ones: Display name or handle of the updater URL to the updater’s profile page (e.g., twitter.com/shannonryan) Body of the update or tweet 18

THIS APPROACH ASSUMES (cont’d): THIS APPROACH ASSUMES (cont’d): Any status update is called a ‘tweet’ for the purposes of this presentation 19

Steps to create a multi-source hub InfoPath/aspnet registration form for employees Collect form-based credentials and store them in Secure Store (“Individual”) For oAuth or other ticket/secret-based authentication – user must authenticate and provide the secret for you to store in SSS 20

Y ou can’t spell ‘Demons’ without

‘Demo’

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Resources

http://weshackett.com/2011/0 6/extending-the-activity-feed with-enterprise-content/ http://archive.msdn.microsoft.

com/activityfeedsconsole

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Questions?

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