Well, we have moved onward and upward to SharePoint 2010 this summer and My Sites seem to have changed substantially, with improved blogs and wikis, social networking tools and lots of ways to collaborate and share. Seems like a good time to have a look at some of the features…
My Profile is an extensive facility where you can share your areas of expertise and your interests with other university users, connect to and interact with colleagues, and generally communicate and collaborate. If you go to a colleague’s profile in their My Site you can leave them a note, now that’s useful. Adding information about you own expertise could make it easier to find people when you’re stuck with that ‘I want to know but who do I ask?’ moment. You can also view and manage your tags and notes. Tags and notes? Well you can now tag and make notes on internal and external resources, for your own use or to share with others. If you see something good, tag it, note it and let others know it’s out there. Brilliant! You can also create and organise groups of colleagues, make team lists, share them or just keep them private but convenient for you. This is all looking a bit ‘social networking’ and has certainly made the My Site feature much more interesting.
Wait a minute, what’s that at the top of the page? Ooh, a status box, just like many of the social networking tools out there have. People can see what you type in here and know what you’re up to. There is quite a lot of information about what you have been working on too. Lists of new, uploaded and edited pages, files and resources in your Tulip sites. Interesting, you might end up feeling like you’re being watched. 
Well there seems to be a lot more to My Sites in SharePoint 2010 and it really is worth exploring your My Profile, Content and News Feed sections as you may find many of the features very useful. My Sites are probably not useful as a primary teaching tool, but for organising, sharing information, working with groups of people and general connectivity they seem to be providing a great deal of what you’ll need.
