The current state of SharePoint 2013 social collaboration
SharePoint has evolved dramatically since its inception over 12 years ago starting off as a Document Store complimentary to Exchange. Workloads have been added over the time and since the beginnings “social collaboration” has been key. The term is bounced around by marketing teams like its going out of fashion, File Shares are social collaboration in the sense that it enables more than one person to collaborate on documents. Obviously SharePoint provides a significantly better story to social collaboration than a file share, but its worth noting that point.
Discussion boards were introduced into SharePoint 2003. The inclusion of Blogs, Wikis and My Sites into SharePoint 2007 started to really step up the social collaboration story. I’ve written plenty about the short comings of these capabilities in the past: wiki limitations and blog limitations.
Jim Ehrenberg (SharePoint Pros, Inc.) 