With the release of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft is clearly showing their commitment to the current social media revolution. SP2013 is packed with different social features designed to function in ways familiar to avid social media users (which, let's face it, is most of the global workforce these days).
Paul jumps in talking about SP integration with Office 365. Almost anything social on SharePoint can be tested on an Office 365 site. On the SharePoint side, users must create a My Site in order to interact with others through the new social features. To me, it seems the best addition is the newsfeed. Paul explains how users can follow people, documents, and sites and have all the pertinent change information show up in a consolidated newsfeed. This allows users to quickly see what is going on with particular projects throughout their farms. This all happens through a consolidated feed web part pulling from a microfeed list, social list, and the velocity cache. Whenever a change is made it is stored in the velocity cache and any appropriate list. This allows the consolidated feed web part to be able to quickly and easily display changes in a user's newsfeed without having to pull data from across the farm. All these social features of course come with security measures requiring permissions to be set up as normal in SharePoint.
Community sites now allow for the creation of categorical groups and pages. This allows you to break down a community into specific areas of work or interest. Community sites in SP2013 are merely common wiki pages with no specific API, making them just like any other page from a developer's angle. Ratings and reputations are available in communities and must be set up for each community. That said, using feature stapling allows developers and admin to create consistent rating and reputation criteria across community sites which then can be consolidated into a single rating and reputation for any given user. With this set up, users can earn badges for overall performance not just per community.
Extending the social features requires a choice of architecture model, be it a farm, sandbox, or the new App model. For the nitty gritty details refer to Paul's slide deck linked below starting at slide 27. Also in his deck are template ID numbers and handy bits of code to help you set up and manage social features on SP2013.
Paul ended each session by reminding people that these features are available now and can be tested through Office 365 sites making the process easy.
