One Newsfeed to Rule Them AllJeff C. KellyPractice Area Lead, Intranets & Business Productivitynon~linear creations

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Jeff C. KellyPractice Lead, Intranets & Business Productivity  jkelly@nonlinear.ca647-776-2556

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

NLC Executive Summary

Microsoft Gold PartnerNLC 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.

Sitecore Worldwide PartnerSitecore 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.

Microsoft FAST Certified PartnerFAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary, is the leading

global provider of best-in-class enterprise search technologies for the

most demanding applications.

• Founded in 1995• 75+ full-time

specialists• Toronto, Ottawa,

Regina, Calgary and Vancouver

• New York, NY• Florianopolis,

Brazil

Client logos, client logos everywhere

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| TORONTO | OTTAWA | CALGARY | REGINA | NEW YORK

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About me

Consultant, writer, blogger, speaker since the 20th century

ECM, DM, KM, Enterprise Social Computing, Forms/Workflow/Portals/EAI, Enterprise Search …

Former web developer (1995-2000)Grey backgrounds, <blink> 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

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{Speaker} delivered the presentation {PresentationTitle} at the conference {NameOfConference}.

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Activities, activities everywhere

TwitterLinkedInYammerSharePoint 2010

EventsStatus Updates

FacebookActivitiesStatus Updates

Blogs/RSSBacn email

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

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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 scheduledNew 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”

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Why not web parts or Tweetdeck/Hootsuite ??

Lots of HTTP traffic back and forth to those public feedsURLs 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 WebDon’t have to install/support/worry about desktop apps

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Anatomy of a Feed

ActivityApplication

ActivityTemplate ActivityType ActivityEvent

Has a collection of Is an instance of

ActivityManager

Extending SharePoint’s Feeds

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Steps to inject our own Activities

Register a custom ActivityApplication using a Farm-scoped FeatureRegister INTO this ActivityApplication a new ActivityType (‘update’ or ‘tweet’)Register users’ credentials (per user/external app) in Secure StoreDeploy a Timer Job that will collect and inject Activities into users’ newsfeeds

The Timer Job will call into a custom Gatherer object

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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 <link to 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 updaterURL to the updater’s profile page (e.g., twitter.com/shannonryan)Body of the update or tweet

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THIS APPROACH ASSUMES (cont’d):

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

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Steps to create a multi-source hub

InfoPath/aspnet registration form for employeesCollect 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

You can’t spell ‘Demons’ without ‘Demo’

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Resources

http://weshackett.com/2011/06/extending-the-activity-feed-with-enterprise-content/http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/activityfeedsconsole

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Questions?