Your Colleagues list identifies who you know so that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help you leverage that information. You can view status information, allow other people to see your relationships, and, by using the My Colleagues privacy category, help protect your information.

Your Colleagues list

Privacy and grouping

Add a name to your Colleagues list

Show or hide colleague names to My Site visitors

Add or remove a colleague in the My Workgroup privacy category

Set alerts on names in your Colleagues list

Organize your colleagues by groups

Remove a name from your Colleagues list

Your Colleagues list

Your Colleagues list starts with your manager, anyone who reports to your manager, and your direct reports. You can remove any of these names and add any name from your company's directory. You can organize your colleagues into groups and choose whether to show a colleague on your public page.

If you and your colleague use an application that provides instant messaging services, such as Microsoft Office Communicator or Microsoft Windows Messenger, a status icon appears next to the colleague's name. The status indicator allows you to see information such as whether he or she is online, in a meeting, or away from their computer.

You can also set up alerts to notify you when an event occurs, such as a when a colleague is out of the office, starts reporting to a different manager, creates a new a document, or changes his or her name.

Sharing your Colleagues list with people in your organization is useful for building relationships and growing your personal network. When people visit your My Site, they can see who you work with and in what capacity. By using this information, the people might be able to find the contacts and information they need to do their work.

Privacy and grouping

By using privacy settings in My Site, Office SharePoint Server 2007 displays information to only a category of people. There are five privacy categories  — Everyone, My Colleagues, My Workgroup, My Manager, and Only Me. The privacy setting you select for a colleague affects who can see that colleague when he or she visits your My Site.

For example, Kevin Cook's Colleagues list includes Denise Smith, Justin Thorp, Bart Duncan, and Mindy Martin. Kevin works directly with Denise, Justin, and Bart on every project, so he shows those colleagues to everyone who visits his My Site public page. Mindy is someone Kevin works with only on special projects, so he does not want to show her as a colleague to everyone. Therefore, Kevin sets up Mindy to display only to his manager  — only Kevin and his manager see Mindy's name when they visit Kevin's My Site.

When you limit a colleague from everyone's view, you also limit what other people see when they view the In Common with You section of your public page. For example, Bart includes Mindy on his Colleagues list, but when he visits Kevin's My Site, he does not see Mindy listed in the Colleagues you both know section of Kevin's In Common with You area, because Kevin has Mindy set to the Only Me privacy setting.

Search results are also affected by privacy settings. When Bart searches for people related to Kevin's project, and Mindy is not Bart's colleague, he does not find Mindy's name as a colleague's colleague.

In the Privacy and Grouping options, you can also choose to add a colleague to your Workgroup. Doing this gives the colleague the privilege to view content that you set to My Workgroup. This is useful for setting up projects specific to a group of people and displaying information related to the project without showing the content to people in other groups.

You can organize your Colleagues list by groups to show relationships. By default, all of your colleagues are in the General group. You can create as many organizational groups as you want. It may be useful to organize your colleagues by projects or by role, such as Finance Project, Sales Project, or My Team. A colleague's name can appear in only one group.

Find links to more information about how to use content privacy on your My Site in the See Also section.

Add a name to your Colleagues list

To add people to your Colleagues list you use the Add Colleagues page. On this page, you may also find the Suggested Colleagues list. This list is compiled from your communication patterns, such as e-mail messages you send and receive, your instant message contacts, and distribution lists and SharePoint site memberships you share with other colleagues.

1. On any SharePoint site, in the upper right corner, click My Site.
2. On the Quick Launch, click Colleagues.
3. On the My Colleagues list toolbar, click Add Colleagues.
4. On the Add Colleagues page, under Identify Colleagues, do one of the following:

   To	Do this
   Add the name of someone you know	Type the name in the Type Names box.
   Search for a name	Next to the Type Names box, click Browse. Type as much of the name as you can in the box, and then click the green arrow. In the search results box, double-click the name of the person you want add. Click OK.
   Add one or more names from the Suggested Colleagues list	Select the check box next to the name.

5. To determine who sees the selected colleagues on your My Profile page, in the Show these colleagues to box, select one of the following categories:

   This category	Allows these people to view the selected colleagues
   Everyone	Everyone with permissions to view your My Site.
   My Colleagues	This category includes anyone currently listed on your My Colleagues page. By default, this category includes your manager, your peers, and your direct reports.
   My Work Group	By default, only your manager, your peers, and your direct reports are in your Workgroup. This category also includes colleagues you have added by using the Add Colleagues to My Workgroup option. New colleagues are not automatically added to your Workgroup.
   My Manager	Your direct manager.
   Only Me	Yourself.

   See more information on privacy settings in the Show or hide colleague names to My Site visitors section.

6. To add the colleague to the My Workgroup privacy category, under Add Colleagues to My Work Group, click Yes.

   See more information on privacy categories in the Privacy and grouping section.

7. To place the colleague into a group organized by role or project, under Grouping, select Existing group, and then click the arrow to pick from a group you have already created or select New Group to type the name of a new group.

   See more information on grouping in the Organize your colleagues by groups section.

Show or hide colleague names to My Site visitors

By using privacy categories, you can decide which My Site visitors see the names in your Colleagues list. Each colleague in the list can be set to be viewed by people who belong to one of five categories. The view of your Colleagues list changes depending on which category the viewer belongs to. By default, a colleague is shown to the category Everyone.

1. On any SharePoint site, in the upper right corner, click My Site.
2. On the Quick Launch, click Colleagues.
3. On the My Colleagues page, select one or more colleagues you want to show or hide from My Site visitors.
4. On the My Colleagues toolbar, click Edit Colleagues.
5. In the Show these colleagues to box, select one of the following categories to determine who sees the selected colleagues on your My Profile page.

   This category	Allows these people to view the selected colleagues
   Everyone	Everyone with permissions to view your My Site.
   My Colleagues	This category includes anyone currently listed on your My Colleagues page. By default, this category includes your manager, your peers, and your direct reports.
   My Work Group	By default, only your manager, your peers, and your direct reports are in your Workgroup. This category also includes colleagues you have added by using the Add Colleagues to My Workgroup option. New colleagues are not automatically added to your Workgroup.
   My Manager	Your direct manager.
   Only Me	Yourself.

Find links to more information about how to use content privacy on your My Site in the See Also section.

Add or remove a colleague in the My Workgroup privacy category

My Workgroup is a category of people that you use when you want to share specific information. For example, you could use My Workgroup to display documents, distribution lists, contact information, and colleagues only to people working on a particular project. You add and remove people in the Workgroup category by using the My Colleagues page.

1. On any SharePoint site, in the upper right corner, click My Site.
2. On the Quick Launch, click Colleagues.
3. On the My Colleagues page, select one or more colleagues.
4. On the My Colleagues toolbar, click Edit Colleagues.
5. Under Add Colleagues to My Work Group, click Yes or No.

Find links to more information about how to use content privacy on your My Site in the See Also section.

Set alerts on names in your Colleagues list

Use colleague alerts to keep track of what is happening with people you work closely with. You can choose to be notified when someone is out of the office, changes departments, subscribes to a distribution list, publishes a new document, or updates a blog. You can turn off any or all alerts. By default, you are notified of changes that occurred within the past 72 hours.

1. On any SharePoint site, in the upper right corner, click My Site.
2. On the Colleague Tracker Web Part, at the bottom, click Change what gets tracked?.
3. Select one or more of the following alerts for the colleagues in your list.

   Use this setting	To be notified when the colleague has one of the following events:
   Anniversaries	A birthday or hire date.
   Profile Property Changes	Changes to manager, title, department, or name. Changes in responsibilities, skills, or interests on the profile page in My Site.
   Membership Changes	Joins or leaves a distribution list or SharePoint site.
   New Documents	Adds a document to SharePoint.
   Out of Office	Is Out of Office as reported in Microsoft Exchange.
   Blog Changes	Creates a new post to his or her blog.

 Note    Your administrator may add other anniversary dates or key property changes to the alert notifications list.

Organize your colleagues by groups

You can organize your colleagues into groups, such as by project name or by role. For example, if you work with Joe, John, and Sarah on the Finance Committee, you might want to create a group called Finance and put those colleagues in that group. Keep in mind that your group names may assist My Site visitors in finding other colleagues who share areas of expertise or interests. Colleague names can only appear in one group.

1. On any SharePoint site, in the upper right corner, click My Site.
2. On the Quick Launch, click Colleagues.
3. On the My Colleagues page, select one or more colleagues.
4. On the My Colleagues toolbar, click Edit Colleagues.
5. Under Grouping, select Existing group, click the arrow, and select a group you have already created, or select New Group to type a new group name. The colleagues you selected are placed in the group you select or type.

 Notes 

• To delete a group, remove all of the colleagues from the group. This automatically deletes the group from your Colleagues list.
• The Existing group called Multiple Values means that the colleagues you have selected are categorized in more than one group.

Remove a name from your Colleagues list

You can remove names from your Colleagues list as you change projects or move to a different department. You always have access to all of the names listed in the directory, so it is easy to add a name back to the list if you change your mind.

1. On any SharePoint site, in the upper right corner, click My Site.
2. On the Quick Launch, click Colleagues.
3. On the My Colleagues page, select one or more colleagues.
4. Click Delete.