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The Power of the Newsfeed

4/28/16 11:08 AM

Look closely at the most popular sites on the worldwide web, and you'll quickly recognize some common features between them. Whether or not you're a fan of them, most Information Workers tend to begin their days on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter -- or on aggregated news sites that increasingly look and function like these social networking juggernauts. And the common feature across all of them? The newsfeed. Once logged in, the newsfeed becomes dynamic, personalized and relevant based on who you are connected to, what is happening within your network, and the content and activities you consume. It is at the center of our social experience, and it is where we go to stay informed. That is the power of the newsfeed.

How People Use the Newsfeed

The newsfeed is at the core of the Beezy solution because it is the best way for people to connect with their content and internal communities within SharePoint, plain and simple. It is a powerful way for individuals to discover and interact with the people, ideas and content that are relevant to them. As an example, a Project Manager named Steven has uploaded several documents into SharePoint as part of the 'Partner Readiness Program' community and "tagged" with relevant keywords, such as #PartnerReadiness and #NewPartner. As he uploaded the content, an activity card was created within the newsfeed. As activity cards are created, the system initiates several collaboration actions:

  • People who follow Steven will get a notification of the new content
  • People who follow the 'Partner Readiness Program' will get a notification
  • People who follow the #PartnerReadiness or #NewPartner keywords will get a notification

Beezy card-based newsfeed

What you'll find in the Beezy image above is a blend of Discovery, Follow-up, and Recovery "cards" that provide a relevant, personalized view into Steven's workload within SharePoint that help him discover new people and content,  follow-up on tasks and actions based on his projects, his interests, and his network connections, and to recover data and conversations that he participated in previously and may need access to later.

The card-based newsfeed is one of the newer user experiences introduced with Office 365. The world came to know this interface layout through Pinterest, which is alongside Facebook and LinkedIn in popularity. What makes Pinterest powerful is that there is intent behind every pin, just as there is intent behind each card within the newsfeed, allowing the user to filter their interests and refine their view of the content they see.

Even within the traditional newsfeed view, which you can find within a Beezy community, you'll find these same patterns for collaboration:

Beezy community newsfeed

Cards appear in your newsfeed based on your profile and preferences, and with Beezy, anything in your newsfeed follow the same permission-trimming rules as any other SharePoint site. Cards surface content based on the communities you join, the people you follow within your network, the topics and keywords that are important to you, and the permissions you have in SharePoint. Both the traditional newsfeed and the card-based newsfeed follow the same patterns of success as the leading social networking sites, incorporating activities around Discovery, Follow-up, and Recovery.

The Office Graph Revolution

When talking about the newsfeed, it is also important to mention Office Graph, which is Microsoft’s method for identifying relationships or connections between individuals and the people, content, and conversations across your network, and providing a powerful, intelligent, and personalized search result based on those connections. While the Office Graph relies on the scale and power of the internet to provide its analysis and results, Microsoft is leveraging this new technology within hybrid solutions to bring the benefits of Office Graph to on-premises environments. And if you missed our press release, Beezy has created some of our own innovations, integrating the Office Graph into our newsfeed to make our solution even more responsive and powerful.

When SharePoint is able to leverage the machine-learning capability within the Office Graph, the platform learns from your actions (and inaction) to help make your newsfeed experience increasingly personalized. In a world where people are increasingly becoming overloaded with collaboration requests and activity, the Office Graph can help refine the volume of what we see, allowing us to refine and focus our collaboration efforts -- such as reducing the noise we see within the newsfeed. When there's less noise, people can better focus on the tasks at hand, increasing their productivity.

At the center of Beezy is the newsfeed. It is increasingly the way that people consume data in the modern digital workplace. As a user experience, the newsfeed is familiar, it is intuitive, and when it is employed within SharePoint it can dramatically improve adoption, engagement, and productivity.

If you would like to better understand how these latest advances in the newsfeed can improve productivity for your team, schedule your demo of Beezy today.

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