The ability to tag and take notes on an object within SharePoint 2010 has been highly publicized by Microsoft and various outlets. However, did you know that you can also tag and note sites outside of SharePoint? Say that article on your local newspapers website that was just pushed about the company, or a website used to source information in a research document. Once a site has been externally tagged, it will display in your activity feed for your colleagues or other people tracking your activities to view. Although, you do have the option, should you choose, to make the tag private to you. Let’s look at just how easy it is to start tagging external sites:
Start off at your My Profile site by clicking My Profile from your username dropdown menu.
Next, select the “Tags and Notes” tab. This page displays areas where you can sort through tags, view your tag cloud, or see recent activities for things you have been tagging. Located in the lower left of this page is the area where we will focus called, “Add SharePoint Tags and Notes Tool”.
As you can see, this tool helps you tag external sites and link them back with your profile. To use this, simply drag the hyperlink and drop it into your favorites bar. Or, right-click on the hyperlink, copy the shortcut, and manually create a bookmark with the link. When you drag and drop, you are presented with a warning prompt about how you should only allow bookmarks that run scripts from sites you trust. We trust our internal SharePoint environment (at least, I hope you do!), so click Yes.
Now, visit an external site (perhaps that local newspaper article) and click the favorite or bookmarklet. The same Tags and Note Board dialog box that you see within SharePoint 2010 will pop up on your browser. From here, simply add a tag or note about the site or article you are on. I am using our external blog site to let colleagues know we launched TCSCBlog.com! I chose to leave my tag as Public for this example.
Once completed, go back to your My Profile page and the Tags and Notes tab. You should see a new entry under the Activities area for your externally tagged site. If your colleagues are tracking your activities, then they will see your tag as well.
This actually isn’t the case. Apparently Sharepoint’s Security Trimmers actively prevent externally tagged sites from showing up in your activity feed.
If you know how to work around this so as to show these externally tagged sites in your newsfeed, I’d love to hear about it. It seems as though you have to implement a custom Security Trimmer to do this, however. (see ) And I don’t know how to start with this!
(Sorry, html tags in my comment are all over the place! Hope you get the gist.)
Dylan,
You are correct in that the external sites that you tag will (by default) only who up for you personally. The security trimmer on the activity feed views all non-crawled external website links as insecure and removes them. So if you tag an external website no one will see it in your feed by default. Grrr….
To address that issue Microsoft added new configuration options in SharePoint 2010 SP1 those options give us the ability to create a list of sites you want checked and assumes if it is not in that list then don’t check it. The details are in the following artice: http://www.harbar.net/archive/2011/07/06/328.aspx
The nutshell is that you can add your own web application URLs to the “must check” box and get the positive benefits of activity trimming without it blocking external websites.
To take this further…
What if we want to include some starter text in the text box ( the url of the site for example ), or start the dialog directly on the notes tab instead of the tagging tab?