Creating Micro Blogs with SharePoint MySites

SharePoint MySites are a great way for employees to have their own personal micro site for storing documents, notes and other information about themselves. For the more adventurous employees through, they are also able to publish their own blogs there for the other employees in the company to follow. These could be knowledge base articles, trials and tribulations with customers or vendors, or just fun stories. The good thing about these blogs are that they are only visible to the internal employees, and also it is a good way for companies to capitalize on today’s social media frenzy.

In this quick walkthrough I will show how you users are able to set up a blog and start posting in a matter of minutes.

For this example, I will resurrect an employee of The Onion. All of this blogging information is plagiarized from here, so I take no credit for the great commentaries on Accounts Receivables:

http://www.theonion.com/personalities/herbert-kornfeld,1019/

Step 1: Create A Blog

All the user has to do in order to start blogging is to go to their MySite, and click on the “Create Blog” link on the right of their content page.

That will create the blogging framework, and we can start blogging.

Step 2: Creating A Blog Post

If you want to create a blog post from inside of SharePoint, then you can click on the “Create a post” link on the right pane of the blogging section and it will open up the post. This will also allow you to manually upload images, and format the text.

A better way to do it though is to click on the “Launch blog program to post”That will open up Word, and link your Word sessions to your SharePoint Blog site.

This will then ask you where you want to store your pictures. It’s easiest to store the pictures on SharePoint, and if you select this option, any pictures that you embed in your blog post will be automatically saved to SharePoint.

When we are linked and can begin wing Word as our blogging editor.

Now Word will open up in a cut down state, allowing your to draft your blog.

Now just give the blog a title, and blog away.

When you have completed your blog, just select the Publish option – you can publish it right away, or store it as a draft for future publishing.

Finished

Now the blog post is published.

Also, whenever anyone within the organization does a search on a topic, and there is a blog post that matches the search, they will be able to reference it.

Blog On!

To see the complete walkthough, you can download it from SkyDrive using the following link: http://sdrv.ms/UCdcaL