Social tagging/bookmarking site for your enterprise

We want to provide a minimum-effort and low-cost solution for setting up a social tagging or bookmarking site (e.g. del.icio.us) for your enterprise inside firewalls. This site enables knowledge discovery and sharing within your enterprise. I am going to show you how to extend a WSS team site to an intranet social bookmarking site. The site provides a platform inside your enterprise for sharing important resources, captures relevant enterprise resource (URLs/documents) and their associated keywords (tags) and thus help search engine improve relevancy and discover hidden enterprise information. Here’s the instructions:

Instructions

  1. Install the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
  2. Deploy our tag cloud and URL browser web parts to the default WSS team site and Add "Tags" field into the "Links" list of your WSS site, which will be your social tagging site for your Enterprise (For more detail about the web parts, please visit our SharePoint Tagging Web Parts page.)
    1. Download our zip file (WSSSearchWebParts.zip) and expand all files to a folder (e.g. C:\WSSSearchWebParts
    2. Open a command prompt
    3. Run the following command from the downloaded folder, DeploySPTagging SITENAME LISTNAME, where the SITENAME is your site's URL and LISTNAME is the list you want to add a "tags" metadata. It may look likes this: C:\WSSSearchWebParts> DeploySPTagging http://tagging Lists
  3. Add the Lists web part to the homepage to show saved links
    1. Go to the homepage and Click on Site Actions
    2. Select Edit Page
    3. Click on "Add a Web Part" button in the middle column
    4. Under the Lists and Libraries category, check on Links and click OK
    5. Links web part is added. Then remove Announcement web parts and Calender web parts or any uncessary default web parts.
    6. To make the web part to show the tags column, click on down arrow of the Links web parts and select Modify Shared Web Part.
    7. On the right panel, click on Edit the current view
    8. In the next page, check "Tags" column and click OK
  4. Import our Tag Cloud web part to the homepage
    1. Go to the Homepage
    2. Select Edit Page from the Site Actions menu in the upper right corner of the page, and click Add a Web Part in one of the zones.
    3. In the Add Web Parts dialog box, click Advanced Web Part gallery and options in the lower right corner.
    4. In the Add Web Parts pane, click Import.
    5. Browse to the location of the TagCloud.dwp file at the downloaded folder, and then click the Upload button. After uploading, the page will refresh, and "Tag Cloud" should be displayed under Imported Web Part.
    6. Drag the icon next to "Tag Cloud" to a zone on the Web Part Page.
    7. Click "x" to close the "Add Web Parts" dialog box.
    8. Click "Exit Edit Mode" to confirm the change.
    9. Browse to the web page you just added the web part and see if it renders correctly with no errors. Now you should see the title of the web part only, because the site does not have the tags data.
    10. The homepage shoud look like this:
    11. Please add a few new URLs with tags to test the web part. To add new URLs, simple click on "Add New Link" in the Lists web part in the middle.
    12. The Links web part will show the links and the Tag Cloud web part displays the tag information.
  5. Add our URL Browser web part into the target Tags.aspx page
    1. Go to the Homepage and click on any links to the Tag Cloud web part. It's supposed to direct you to a tags.aspx page.
    2. In the Tags.aspx page, select Edit Page from the Site Actions menu in the upper right corner of the page, and click Add a Web Part in one of the zones.
    3. In the Add Web Parts dialog box, click Advanced Web Part gallery and options in the lower right corner.
    4. In the Add Web Parts pane, click Import.
    5. Browse to the location of the URLBrowser.dwp file at the downloaded folder, and then click the Upload button. After uploading, the page will refresh, and "URL Browser" should be displayed under Imported Web Part.
    6. Drag the icon next to "URL Browser" to a zone on the Web Part Page.
    7. Click "x" to close the "Add Web Parts" dialog box.
    8. Remove the default Tag Browser web part on the page.
    9. Click "Exit Edit Mode" to confirm the change.
    10. The final look of the Tags.aspx page:

Improving Relevance of intranet search in your enterprise

The social bookmarking site can be added into the authoritative sites list of the MOSS 2007 search setting if your enterprise is using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the Search enabled. The ranking of those resource tagged in the bookmarking site will be boosted. Imagine that there are two documents A and B with the same keyword density of the keyword “SharePoint”, they are ranked in the same position for the query “SharePoint” based on common ranking formula. What’s happened if the document A is tagged in the bookmark site? It becomes an anchor/URL link from the bookmarking site to the document A, the click distance for the document A is shorter than the document B (shorter distances tend to be more relevant). Therefore, the document A’s ranking is increased.