Microsoft Announces SharePoint 2010
Recently, at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, NV, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer officially announced the much anticipated release of SharePoint 2010. The majority of the conference focused on the new features in SharePoint 2010. Allow us to take a few minutes to provide you a quick overview of some of these new features.
- User Interface: The most significant change to SharePoint 2010 is the revised user interface. SharePoint now has a ribbon tool bar familiar to Office 2007 users. Additionally, users can now multi-select items in a list in order to perform the same operation on multiple items.
- SharePoint Workspace: Formally known as Groove this off-line version of SharePoint has been greatly enhanced to provide a better client-side experience when users are disconnected from the network.
- Site Workflows: SharePoint 2010 now includes site workflows. These workflows are not attached to a list or a library but instead attached at the site level.
- SharePoint Designer Enhancements: The SharePoint Designer interface has been updated with a ribbon bar and a simpler non-folder-based navigation. Other enhancements include easier workflow design tools.
- Office Services: SharePoint 2007 included Excel services. In SharePoint 2010 all of the office formats including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio and Access can be rendered in the browser.
- New Product Names: Not so earth-shattering but nonetheless important are the new names of the SharePoint family of products. WSS, the free version of SharePoint, is now called SharePoint Foundation (and is still free). What used to be known as MOSS now comes in two versions, SharePoint Server Standard and SharePoint Server Enterprise.
- FAST Search: The integration with the FAST Search Server is complete in SharePoint 2010. FAST is the enterprise search product that Microsoft acquired in 2008. Its integration with SharePoint provides many enhanced search options including document preview in the search results and related items searches.
- External Lists: Data from external systems can be displayed as SharePoint lists through the use of Business Connectivity Services (formerly Business Data Catalogs). These external lists look and act like a native SharePoint list all while the data is stored in an external data base.
- Better Integration with Microsoft Office: The SharePoint 2010 integration with Office is nearly seamless. Users in Office can perform tasks such as searching a SharePoint list to find an image to insert into their PowerPoint presentation in the exact same manner as they would search their local drive.
- PowerPivot: While not technically part of the SharePoint family, SharePoint will take advantage of Microsoft’s in-memory database technology. PowerPivot (formerly Gemini) allows hundreds of millions of rows of data to be stored in memory thereby allowing filters, sorting and queries to be performed in a fraction of a second.
SharePoint 2010 is scheduled for public beta in November. Keep an eye on our blog and newsletter for information about additional enhancements and our opinion of this highly anticipated release of SharePoint.
Tags: Business Connectivity Services, Business Data Catalogs, Gemini, Groove, Microsoft Office, MOSS, PowerPivot, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint FAST, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Workspace, WSS
Read more posts by Derek Neiding
November 16th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Microsoft SharePoint is going to be disruptive for PDM/PLM community, in my view. Read some of my thoughts on http://plmtwine.com
SharePoint 2010 – is it good for PLM?
http://plmtwine.com/2009/07/16/ms-sharepoint-2010-is-it-good-for-plm/
Best, Oleg
November 16th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Why PLM need to learn about SharePoint 2010 Composites?
http://plmtwine.com/2009/10/21/why-plm-need-to-learn-about-sharepoint-2010-composites/
November 16th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
SharePoint 2010 communities and PLM social demands
http://plmtwine.com/2009/10/27/sharepoint-2010-communities-and-plm-social-demands/
November 17th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Thanks for reading