SharePoint 2010 is polished, refined, and feature-rich

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been invited to spend a few days visiting various teams within Microsoft. One of the first teams I had the pleasure to meet with was the SharePoint Team. Well, I didn’t get to meet the entire team (its members are no doubt quite busy), but Richard Riley, the group product manager, demonstrated various features that illustrated the business value of SharePoint 2010 quite well.

With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft steps further into the Internet space for collaboration. With previous versions, the enterprise was the focus. However, with SharePoint 2010 the goal has clearly broadened to encompass the Internet (or extranet) needs of a business. Microsoft has broken down the capability areas of SharePoint into six points:

• Sites: Ultimately, sites remain unchanged in concept from legacy SharePoint versions, although SharePoint 2010 polishes up the look and interactivity within them. Sites relate to the individual collections of pages that provide content for your internal and external viewers.
• Communities: When we think of “community,” we might consider a variety of existing technologies dispersed through different methods. Twitter, MySpace, Yammer — all of these help build communities (typically with the world at large), whereas SharePoint 2010 includes a variety of tools to provide the same functionality within the enterprise.
• Content: Content might be boiled down to document management, records management, and Web-content management.
• Search: Search features have improved, thanks to the integration of Fast, a technology purchased in 2008 from a Norwegian company. The improvements help ensure smoother performance when searching Web content, file shares, and line-of-business applications. One demo showed searching for data and coming upon a PowerPoint document that you could preview the slides directly within the search. My reaction: “Oh, that is nice!”
• Insights: Business intelligence (BI) capabilities are improved within SharePoint, thanks to the integration of PerformancePoint services combined with better Excel Web Services and Visio Web Services.
• Composites: This aspect has been described as the ability to develop customized enterprise solutions without having to custom-build applications or involving IT at every turn by using out-of-box features.

Within each focus point, Riley demonstrated how the new SharePoint product was evolving and maturing into a strong platform for collaboration within the enterprise and on the Internet.

Site editing For example, site editing has evolved to make for a much simpler method of live preview, for quick editing of content on the site. This richer editing experience combined with the new ribbon interface make for an almost desktop application feel to your interface. Even the process for adding and removing media elements is similar to that of working with an installed Office app, rather than a Web-based version.

One feature I especially liked was the ability to change your themes. This isn’t a new concept by any means, but what was new is how it integrates with your existing Office themes. With Office 2007 (and Office 2010), you can create themes in one app, then use them in others. Your PowerPoint theme for a particular presentation can be applied to a Word or Excel document, as well as to a SharePoint site, for consistency of formatting. In addition, you can choose one of many prepared site themes or create your own through the themes developer.

Content management From the content perspective, new features like Managed Metadata can help perform tasks such as tagging data; you can also use the new Navigation Hierarchy filtering control to locate that data again. Another new feature is Document Sets, which allow you to manage entire groups of documents as aggregate entities. In addition, the workflow process has been enhanced to provide for better management of processes and tasks relating to your content.

One cool new feature is the ability to work with Visio 2010 to design workflows; there’s a new template you can pull into Visio 2010 with all the design icons.

Community collaboration Through SharePoint 2010’s communities functionality, the social experience is refined to help people make connections and interact (and hopefully collaborate) with their colleagues. I asked Riley if Microsoft has found these tools to be time-wasters for employees: With Twitter and Facebook becoming a time-stealer at many companies, would companies trust similar tools in SharePoint 2010?

Beyond the obvious fact that these tools are not play-oriented in the way a Facebook site can be (that is, Farmville is not an option), Riley explained that such concerns tend to settle down over time. For example, he said that instant messaging early on might have been a time-waster, but today people don’t typically use IM to just chat all day long. Instead, it provides for both presence and quick collaboration that many of us can’t work effectively without.

Riley shared an experience where he tagged items and others began following along with his tags. An important document was released, and as a result of his colleagues following his tags and posts, they reviewed the document without being asked and provided feedback, even making corrections. He said that never would’ve happened without the social connection tools. The tools encouraged the interaction, which in turn produced better documentation because the community was working together.

Business intelligence Under the insight aspect of SharePoint are some tremendous improvements to the business intelligence (BI) portions. For example, the addition of integrated PerformancePoint dashboards with Excel and Visio services makes for a much better display of data.

One of the impressive BI demonstrations was its ability to connect back to SQL data and link your data with your SharePoint lists. In SharePoint 2007, you could read the data, but with SharePoint 2010 you can both read and write, so you can make a change in your SharePoint list that gets written back to your SQL database. (Note: There are solid security pieces in play.) Even better, you can use that same concept and go one step further to make changes to data to another app through SharePoint and have it update the SQL as well.

Behind Backstage and beyond Riley also showed me how much better the interaction is between Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. One thing I haven’t fully understood until now is the new Backstage aspect to Office 2010, but seeing it in this context was very helpful. Opening a document is easy enough from a document library, but once you have it, you can check out documents, manage versions, and so forth all through the Backstage view. You can see all the document’s metadata and update it from the Backstage.

Additional new features include PowerPoint broadcasting through SharePoint, document co-authoring whereby different people can work on and edit a document simultaneously, improved Outlook alerts, and using SharePoint Workspaces (formerly Groove) to manage offline documents. But my favorite piece was the Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote), which allow you to work on documents without Office installed on the system. Having the ability to render and edit documents through the browser (and multiple browsers are supported with equal functionality) is great.

Finally, under the concept of composites, I saw one final demonstration in which users creating an online list form can take advantage of InfoPath Designer 2010 from within SharePoint and make immediate changes.

Usage and benefits are soaring I was pretty impressed all around. SharePoint 2010 is jam-packed with new features that matter, ones that will increase productivity if used properly. I predict the number of companies using SharePoint is going to soar with this next release. I’ve been working with SharePoint since its first release (where I hated it) through 2007 (where it was growing on me) on to 2010 (where I can honestly say I’m really impressed by and loving it).

What about you? Does SharePoint have you pulling your hair out? Let the SharePoint team know what your needs are in the comments below (they will be reading). After all, if it isn’t in SharePoint 2010, it might make it into the next version.

This article, “SharePoint 2010 is polished, refined, and feature-rich,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com.