Areas of Expertise web part

The Areas of Expertise web part is intended for display on users’ public profile pages. It lists the tags that the user has the highest expertise scores for, but no more than ten of them. These are displayed with the best matches at the top.

Very often this web part is displayed directly adjacent to the SharePoint Ask Me About web part on the user’s profile page, and when Spotlight is first installed in the lists of tags displayed in these two web parts usually looks very similar.

However, over time, the tags in the Areas of Expertise web part more reflects the user’s actual use of the system, and can therefore give a better reflection of what subjects the user is actually engaged in and knows a lot about.

This difference is of value to visitors to the page, in giving an even better sense of who the user is and/or what role they functionally play in the organization.

It can be additionally valuable to the user visiting his own profile page, for re-evaluating the self-assessments he did when filling out his My Interests and Ask Me About profile properties.

A user visiting his own profile page therefore sees the message Click a tag to manage in this web part. Clicking one of his areas of expertise shows a popup menu with up to three options, as appropriate:

My Top Tags

• Add to my Ask Me About: This adds the tag to the Ask Me About list in the user's SharePoint profile. This lets others find the user more easily in People Search.
• Add to my My Interests: This adds the tag to the My Interests list in the user's SharePoint profile. This lets others find the user more easily in People Search.
• Suppress my score for this tag: This removes your score for this tag. Only do this if you think the tag does not relate to you. This actually hides your score for the tag instead of deleting it, so the tag won’t return as an area of expertise for you based on your future use of the system.

The user also sees these tags listed among the recommendations for adding to Ask Me About and My Interests when editing their SharePoint profile.

Visitors to another user’s profile page do not see these options. Instead, when a visitor clicks on one of these tags, they see a popup that allows them to ask that person a question about the topic represented by the tag, by just typing their question and clicking Post (see picture below).

They don't need to include the person's @ target, nor the topic's hashtag: these are both added automatically after they click Post.