SharePoint Sharpener

This is it – the long awaited SharePoint 2010 has been unveiled, not released, by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The public beta will be available next month.

SharePoint 2010 is a huge update of the platform and most attendees at the keynote were blown away by the dramatic improvements across the board in SharePoint.

Jeff Teper (MS Corporate VP), Jared Spataro (MS Director, SharePoint) and Arpan Shah (Director, SharePoint Technical Management) showed off many of the new features in SharePoint 2010 – see my notes below.

New features in 2010

User interface

• Ribbon-based contextual menus, much like in Office 2007
• Live preview of font changes etc.
• Broad use of AJAX to minimise number of page refreshes
• More seamless integration of web-based and desktop clients
• All Office documents can now be viewed and edited in a rich web version of the desktop client

Accessibility

• Cross-browser compatibility
• XHTML and WCAG compatible output

Collaboration

• Completely revamped wiki
• Improved editing tool
• Dramatically improved image upload and handling
• Richer blogs
• Improvements to the calendar lists
• Web-based, OneNote-like functionality

Organisation

• Tagging, social tagging
• Rating of documents
• Bookmarks

MySite and Social Computing

• Smart profiles
• Activity feed – overview of a user’s recent activity
• Browse colleagues
• Locate experts within the organisation
• Tag cloud of a person’s recent activities
• Note board – i.e. a tagwall

Content Management

• Improved scalability – lists and folders can now contain a million elements. Document libraries can contain 10 million documents
• Digital Asset Management
• Consistent content type across all servers in a farm
• Streaming of video placed in document libraries
• Improved governance possibilities

Search

• Choice between standard SharePoint search and FAST Search
• Wild card searching – used of asterisks
• Improved people search – rich info on the search results page
• Live preview of documents, slides etc right on the search results page

Business intelligence

• Excel Services – including SQL Server PowerPivot
• PerformancePoint Services – advanced BI dashboards
• Visio Services and Chart web part
• Business Connectivity Services – the new name for Business Data Catalog (BDC)

SharePoint Workspace (the new name for Groove)

• Improved offline content
• Improved mobile access to content

IT infrastructure

• 64-bit only!
• SharePoint Foundation is the new name for WSS
• Online/cloud version of SharePoint is a focus point for Microsoft
• PowerShell Admin
• Fully scriptable admin of SharePoint
• Around 500 PowerShell commandlets will be shipped with 2010
• Admin SharePoint from PowerShell running on Windows 7
• Whatif command to preview impact of commands
• New Central Administration
• Problems and solutions page with overview of current problems on the farm, and possible solutions
• Throttling
• Control how many resources specific lists, sites etc. may use
• Monitoring, Analytics
• Usage analysis database will be customisable
• Improved Upgrade and Availability
• Visual Upgrade enables individual users to choose when to upgrade a site