What's New: User Profiles and Social Data in SharePoint Server 2010

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

In this article
Activity Feeds
Social Data
User Profiles

This topic lists the new areas of programmability for user profiles and social data in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Two significant additions to the SharePoint Server 2010 object model are in the new Microsoft.Office.Server.ActivityFeed namespace and the new Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData namespace. For guidance about getting started with development in these namespaces, see User Profiles and Social Data: Setting Up Your Development Environment.

Activity Feeds

The Microsoft.Office.Server.ActivityFeed namespace contains the public API for extending and programmatically using new functionality in SharePoint Server 2010 that publishes and gathers the activities (particularly social networking activities) of site users.

See Microsoft.Office.Server.ActivityFeed and Using Activity Feeds with the Object Model for documentation of the public classes, methods, and properties in this namespace.

See Code Sample: Multicasting Activity Events Console Application and Code Sample: Send a Link to Your Colleagues Activity Event for code samples that demonstrate how to perform fundamental tasks with this namespace.

Social Data

The Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData namespace contains the public API for extending and programmatically using social networking functionality in SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint Server 2010 provides functionality for programmatically creating and aggregating social tags, ratings, and comments.

See Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData and Creating and Using Social Data with the Object Model for documentation of the public classes, methods, and properties in this namespace.

See Code Sample: Social Data Statistics Web Part and Code Sample: Colleague Approval Social Tagging Application Page for code samples that demonstrate how to perform fundamental tasks with this namespace.

User Profiles

The Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles namespace contains two new types, and classes for creating and managing them. The OrganizationProfile class is equivalent to UserProfile. This class enables you to group and distinguish users by membership in organizations that have properties equivalent to those that a UserProfile object would have. You manage this class by using the OrganizationProfileManager class.

Another new class, ProfileSubtype, enables you to create role-specific properties for any type of profile. For example, this class can distinguish users who are customers from those who are employees, or between employees who perform different functions in an organization. Use the ProfileSubtypeManager class to manage ProfileSubtypes, and use the ProfileSubtypePropertyManager class to manage properties for ProfileSubtypes.

Although the Property class is still available for backward compatibility, you can now set profile properties by using the more granular CoreProperty, ProfileTypeProperty, and ProfileSubtypeProperty classes.

See Configuring the User Profile Store Using the Object Model and Accessing the User Profile Store Using the Object Model for documentation about how to use the public classes, methods, and properties in this namespace.

See Code Sample: SharePoint-to-LinkedIn Connector for a code sample that demonstrates how to customize MySite pages and how to create new user profile properties.

See Also

Concepts

User Profiles and Social Data in SharePoint Server 2010