#SFVSPUG Talks Social and Metadata

SharePoint

I normally don’t write about my SharePoint User Group meetings, but we had a really good presentation last night. The San Fernando Valley SPUG hosted Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) as he presented "The Connection Between Metadata, Social Tools, and Personal Productivity."

One feedback item from our member survey a few months ago was that our presentations were too focused on technology and not enough on the business. So, this presentation made perfect sense. In fact, Christian pointed out early on, that his presentation had very little to do with SharePoint.

The best quote of the evening and the reason for this post was this:

"Social is just a layer of search that provides context."

That may seem like an obvious statement once you’ve heard it but it is thought-provoking as well. It’s one of the best ways to describe exactly what "Social" means for SharePoint.

In fact, if you think about it, the statement is true regardless of platform and its even truer outside the intranet. On the internet, there’s so much data and so many ways to access the data, no one can keep up. Without context, that data is meaningless. However, if a computer system knows me, my behaviors, my colleagues, it can better guess what I’m looking for.

In the most simplistic form it means knowing I want to look at a car, not an insect when I search for "beetle." Or in the corporate world, knowing that I’m looking for Visio diagrams of computer systems when I search for "architecture," not AutoCAD drawings of buildings.

If metadata powers relevant search, then this layer of "Social" provides perhaps the most important piece of metadata: you.

What do you think?

 

Christian Buckley:

Links to SFVSPUG:

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