Introducing SharePoint 2010

<P>People of Europe once said, “All roads lead to Rome!” People working with Microsoft technologies can now say, “All roads lead to SharePoint!”</P>

I’ve had some time to reflect now since the Microsoft SharePoint Conference, held in Las Vegas earlier this year. While I’m excited about the new and improved features that I’ve seen, it’s this sense of being at the epicentre of tomorrow’s Microsoft business solutions that has really stood out to me.

Whether it’s business intelligence with PerformancePoint Services, customer management with Dynamics CRM, procurement with Dynamics AX, it’s happening in, on and through SharePoint. If you are managing Office files, publishing an internet site, enabling social networking, interacting with data from SAP, publishing reports over your data warehouse, orchestrating business processes, you can do it leveraging SharePoint. And whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud it all happens on, in and through SharePoint. And the new version being released next year makes it all easier for everyone: end users, power users, knowledge managers, developers and system administrators.

End users get a range of social networking features and a new user interface that introduces the contextual Ribbon, providing a consistent editing experience across all the Office clients and Office web applications. Speaking of Office web applications, these are now baked into SharePoint so users can open and view Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets directly in the browser within SharePoint regardless of whether they have the Office desktop installed or not. This means access from any device with a browser, no more waiting for a client application to load, and no worrying about having the right version just to view a Word document!

Power users are empowered through improved tooling in SharePoint Designer 2010 and InfoPath 2010. As a small example, SharePoint Designer workflows can now be configured and published for use on many lists, a personal point of frustration for me with 2007. InfoPath, combined with the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS), allows rapid development of more complex forms that can read and write to line of business applications.

Knowledge managers can take advantage of significant improvements around the management of global metadata and content types, metadata-driven navigation, and extended document and records management capabilities. A formal corporate taxonomy can be centrally managed, while end users can populate the informal folksonomy, and knowledge managers can promote folksonomy terms up to the taxonomy when appropriate.

We have improved Form Services and Excel Services and now have the new Visio Services. Want to visualise data, processes, or architectures through the browser using the Microsoft tool users know? Visio Services lets users publish diagrams from the Visio client application to SharePoint, allowing other users to view them through a browser without requiring the Visio client. Provide these diagrams with dynamic data feeds and you now have a rich visual reporting and monitoring tool.

Need to more easily deploy custom web parts and modules? You need a Sandbox. Developers now have vastly improved tooling through Visual Studio 2010 and another deployment option provided by the new Sandbox framework, essentially a quarantine zone for custom code. There is a new lightweight theming model, improved accessibility and browser compliance, and additional user interface features to help improve the editing and collaboration experience.

For those managing the SharePoint infrastructure and platform there is improved tooling for monitoring, backup and restore, and geographic distribution. Shared Service Providers (SSP) are now gone, with a more easily managed farm services model in their place, and there is more published guidance and best practices.

These are a few highlights that show there has been as much focus on improving core capabilities, such as document management, web content editing and search, as there has been to adding new features like Visio Services and social networking tools.

For more information and demonstrations of these and all the other new features and improvements, you’ll have to come and see us!