Social Networking in SharePoint 2007

Some time ago a client asked me, "Can you install Social Networking for me?" My first thought was, oh my god, i work with SharePoint 2007 since beta 2 and i have never seen this feature!

I did some research on this topic and saw that i already was using it but never heard from the term Microsoft was using.

In short what is Social Networking in SharePoint?

• My Sites : the personal site for each user with a public and a private part.
  
• The Collegues webpart : The colleagues list is a presentation of other organization members that the specified user works closely with in terms of organizational structure, interaction (i.e., email conversations and instant messaging contact lists) and group/site memberships
  
• The Collegue tracker webpart : The colleague tracker web part allows organization members to privately view their list of compiled colleagues and to modify their views and inclusion in their colleagues list
  
• SharePoint Sites, Links, and Membership Web Parts : These web parts provide the ability for users to view their own Office SharePoint Server site, group and mail list memberships and links as well as those that they have in common with others
  
• In Common With Web Part : Office SharePoint Server provides a summary view of information relating to the memberships, organizational managers and colleagues that a visitor has in common with the owner of a My Site.
  
• Presence Information : When coupled with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information indicating online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information is displayed whenever user information is presented (i.e., colleagues and colleague tracker web parts, etc.).
  
• People Search : as you can search on documents you can also search on people in your company/intranet. You can also search on the user profile properties like interests, function, ...

If you are interested in more, i can advise this nice post on the Microsoft SharePoint Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/10/24/enabling-and-managing-social-networks-for-business-use-with-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx