The My Site architecture brings together information based on different contexts.  The base components that make up the MySite architecture are:

• My Network
• My Profile
• My Content

The My Network and My Profile sections live on the MySite host site where the My Content section lives within an individuals MySite. 

The My Network page is new and displays a new Activity feed of information that allows users to track not only people but also terms they want to follow.  These items are put together based on timer jobs which the architecture allows administrators to define how often these jobs will run.  This feed is also extensible for developers to enable custom items to show in the feed such as when another employee schedules a meeting with a customer from CRM.

The new MySite profile allows a Facebook like status to let others know what you are working on which can be modified in the My Profile section.  The My Profile section also contains the new organizational chart is now built in Silverlight which allows end users to dynamically navigate the organizational structure without reloading the page for each user.

Finally the My Content area is the site that you control what content you wish to publish for other users.

Since pictures are a key item when looking through MySites, the MySite host site collection now contains a centralized picture library to assist in a single place to put all employee images.  With the centralized library the picture picker also allows extensibility to work with areas where you may need an opt-out policy for images, or give the ability for users to update their own.  The new profile database now allows a two-way sync for not only images, but also other user profile properties.

New functionality that piggybacks off of individual’s MySite profiles is the concept of Social Tagging.  Social Tagging allows all people to rate and tag pages, items, documents with terms which others can “subscribe” to.  All social tags are stored into an Enterprise Metadata store so people can re-use the tags throughout the organization.  Having the Enterprise Metadata store also allows SharePoint Administrators to pre-define terms that will show up for people to start using.  Once you follow a term, that will also start to show up in the Activity Feed.  Along with tagging items, you can also write more specific content on content by writing on the Note Board.

The MyLinks feature in MOSS 2007 will be going away in the SharePoint 2010 platform, but they have created a way for end users to move their links into social tags (they didn’t show this yet… so we’ll have to see how this works).

[“Brian”]