Back story: Sitting with a client, their entire focus for their SharePoint project was geared around the social networking abilities of SharePoint 2010. What I did know, was area got a huge upgrade between 2007 and 2010. I also know how MySites work, how they are configured. I would even go far as to say, I am quite comfortable with setting up Profile Synchronization despite its idiosyncrasies. The SharePoint 2010 proof of concept was up, everything was running smooth, and AD was synchronizing nicely. Lets see how this bad boy works with Office 2010. Then to my stark realization the supposed super cool, outrageously awesome tie in to SharePoint and Outlook information called the Office Social Connector was blank. NOTHING! Its just a flick of the switch, right? Not exactly. I walked into this looking at Office 2010, Outlook 2010 specifically, as a black box that knows what to do.
Wowsers, where’s the info!?
The Problem: So here is the problem I encountered. SharePoint and Office do work well with each other, BUT… There is more to the Office Social Connector than meets the eyes. There are more steps involved depending on what you want to display. The problem lies in, there is very little about it in one place.
Needed Information: After several days of piecing fragmented information together, the black box began to become more translucent. Let me share with you my findings. This is not going to be a huge developer deep dive of vast proportions to break the code to the Fort Knox of Microsoft Code. This is to try and give to you what I learned in layman’s terms in every day speech. This way you know what is needed to make the Office Social Connector work with your network. Minimally. If your looking to tie it to other sources, such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc. No soup for you.
Nothing was in the social connector, not even emails related to that individual. How could that be? What was wrong? What needs to be put in place? Windows Desktop Search. Yeah you heard me correctly. It makes sense when you think about it. My client is still running on a Windows XP image. Windows Desktop Search was not a part of the image. So this is why even this information was not available. Here is where I got found the fragment that pointed me in that direction. “To take advantage of the features that are available with the Outlook Social Connector, you must run Outlook 2010 in Cached Exchange Mode with Windows Desktop Search and have Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 My Site configured for users. In this configuration, local items — such as e-mail messages, meetings, and attachments from the sender — will be included in the communication history. Additionally, with My Site configured you can view the activity feed from the sender’s My Site.” This can be found Determine which features to enable or customize in Outlook 2010.
Once I installed Windows Desktop Search and it indexed my machine, as if like magic most everything started up. Sweet! Oh yeah baby! Out of morbid curiosity, I switched over to my laptop which is running Windows 7. I found a pleasant surprise. My information was already showing. Suddenly I remember, Windows Desktop Search is baked into Vista and Windows 7. No wonder why I was just expecting it to work. Certainly good to know.
As for the feed updates. not nearly as difficult. Click the big green + Add under any of your pictures and let it rip. Type in the URL to your MySites, then username and password. BAM! There it is. This was not difficult. No worries, there.
Last thing, seems to be a wall bigger than the Great Wall of China… photos. Why are they not there? We all put our images in our SharePoint profiles. Yeah… Yet, nothing. Grrrrr! It took several days of research and redesigning my Bing (see that Microsoft! 
) searches to get the information I was looking for. When I finally came to the answer I must have looked like a deer in the headlights. I was certainly not expecting it. I knew at the clients many of the executive board want the images populated. I also knew we were going to be in a battle with the AD owners. Let me give you the excerpt from the Blog post the Office team put out there about this very thing that helped me understand what needed to happen. “
I’ll use Active Directory since it will be the most common type of server used. What is the benefit of storing pictures in Active Directory? Well, the new Outlook social connector will pull from what is stored in the thumbnailPhoto attribute so a picture of a sender is visible in email. SharePoint 2010 will sync users pictures directly to the thumbnailPhoto attribute.” Found at SharePoint 2010 Profile Picture Property 101. Now if you are like me you are going to say, what was that? Store the images in AD? Really? I have to say… Really. We tested the theory and sure enough, the images once all the AD servers synchronized. So this is where it gets interesting. How are you going to get the images in there? Well SharePoint can do it! BUT (There always is a big butt with these, isn’t there?) This means the battle with AD team members will have to be picked up again. This time they are going to have to give your LDAP service account even more privileges to make changes in AD. Good times will be had with your governance committee to give solid business reasons as to why you want to increase the permission radius of your LDAP account. Unless you have the trump card, “Because the executives said so.” Everyone has to give their LDAP account Replicate Directory Changes permission. That was a battle to let them understand that without it SharePoint Profile Synchronization would not happen. Here is the excerpt from the TechNet article of what needs to be added. “If you will export property values from SharePoint Server to AD DS, the synchronization account must have Create Child Objects (this object and all descendants) and Write All Properties (this object and all descendants) permissions on the organizational unit (OU) that you are synchronizing with. See Grant Create Child Objects and Write permission for instructions to grant this permission.” Yeah, this is to allow you to change SharePoint from import to export.
Solution Had: Once these changes were put in place the Office Social Connector worked like a champ. Lesson learned, SharePoint touches everything. Its no longer the simple plug and play of 2001. (If you could even call that plug and play) I needed to put this out there because I know many of you are looking for the same answers. With them being spread all over the internet, having it in one area, certainly helps.