Facebook is very popular but does it make sense in an organization, well here is someone who thinks not http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/my-sites-do-they-work/ and here is another with a less diplomatic view http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2009/04/16/sharepoint-my-sites-suck.aspx
So what is the beef well
- Facebook does whatever it does really well but what is that exactly that helps advance a business case inside your organization. Really what?
- Consider Facebook takes NO HTML to use BUT to tweak sharepoint mysites you'll need to get your head round web parts and potentially HTML and - be honest - how many users do you know that can use this web parts, even with training, how many want to spend the time?.
- In a few sentences explain what my sites are for? Can't? perhaps there is a reason for that.
- Maybe in answer to three you said something about the profile feature. Wouldn't it be useful to see what expertise there is around the organization / enterprise?. OK let's think about a scenario: You are the best DB programmer in a big organization and you are a busy busy fellow, and now you have the opportunity to tell the whole enterprise that you are also an expert in COBOL would you? NO you wouldn't, you're busy, there is no chance you would spend time making yourself more work. If you don't believe me then here is some evidence from 10 years at IBM http://giatalks.com/blog/sharepoint-my-sites-it-aint-just-about-profiles-people/
BUT before we all give up in despair, the same article has some interesting and perhaps obvious alternatives. To return to the scenario above : you are an expert you might like to have a blog or an FAQ that you can direct people to make sure that you don't get asked the same question for the hundredth time. Gia Lyons makes the distinction between seekers and contributors, one are always looking over profile type information and contributors are the sort who they are looking for.
Contributors share their experiences and expertise via an internal Internet-style blog service that enables not only individual blogs, but team blogs, and offers all blogs on a single website for easy browsing, searching, and integration with other applications via a RESTful API, also automatically associated with and accessible from a user’s profile. Seekers can discover experts simply by subscribing to a particular topic from the blog service - no need to go through a profile first (but you can if you want).
