Rolling out SharePoint? --- learn from social networking software

This past weekend, I spoke at a regional SharePoint users conference in northern Virginia.  The afternoon speaker was a journalist from the Washington Post who writes about technology.  His topic was social networking software, not specifically about SharePoint, but about software on the web such as MySpace, Facebook, and eVite.  He was challenged by a member of the audience (an eclectic group of new SharePoint users and administrators as well as hard core developers) – how does this type of software relate to people who are deploying Microsoft SharePoint inside their organizations?

I think that the real lesson that businesses need to leverage from the popularity of social networking software is that we should immediately try to learn from the successful collaboration on sites like Facebook and MySpace and look for lessons we can apply in our enterprise collaboration solutions built on SharePoint.

As the millennial generation enters the workforce, it’s likely that many if not most of the barriers to success for collaboration solutions (end user adoption, organizational cultures that inhibit knowledge sharing, lack of leadership involvement, etc.) will significantly diminish as an entire generation that grew up collaborating online takes over.  For this newly minted workforce, collaboration online won’t be something extra that they do, it will just be what they do to get their work accomplished.

What’s the big deal about social networking software for IT folks implementing SharePoint?  It’s the lessons we can learn about how this next generation connects and how the value of the existing technology in MOSS (for example, blogs and wikis) might be demonstrated best by the newest entrants to the company.