SharePoint 2010 Enhancements for Administrators and End Users

Jeff Teper, Microsoft corporate vice president, Office business platform,  followed the Steve Ballmer keynote at the Microsoft SharePoint conference. He drilled into improvements in and innovations in SharePoint sites, communities, content management, search, and business intelligence (BI). Teper took special pains to call out places in the product where the SharePoint community had provided feedback. For administrators major news is that SharePoint 2010 embraces PowerShell; it will ship with more than 500 cmdlets.The upgrade process will be improved.

Some of the innovations in this round highlighted by Teper include:

Sites: Teper noted that since SharePoint 2007 Microsoft has provided a consistent architecture across the Internet, intranet and extranet. For SharePoint 2010 the goal was to make it much easier to use; it’s "a replumbing of the UI." The reach of SharePoint has been improved: XML, accessibility, multilingual is supported natively. There's new Office web app support integrated into the context of SharePoint. Mobile and remote access to SharePoint--look for enhanced use of Groove.

Communities: Teper notes that improvements cover both traditional collaboration and Web 2.0 social media features. Wiki enhancements include complex templating. There are more blogging features. Social tagging has been stepped up; they call "using the power of the crowd." Microsoft considers itself a pioneer in business social networking: The My Sites experience has been improved with the ability to find and aggregate My Site information. It's easier to search profiles and find people in the organization.

Content management: Microsoft is improving the ability to sift though huge amounts of data. SharePoint 2010 architecture now includes the ability to handle lists of one million plus items, plus library scaling to search across hundreds of millions of items. For taxonomy management there's a single metadata store. Users can tag and organize information and use very rich navigation. SharePoint 2010 content types will work across all farms in an organization.

Search: is enhanced by Silverlight. There's an improved relevance algorithm for people searching. Users will be able to search across much larger sets of data.

Insights: Making BI mainstream with Power Pivot (formerly code named Gemini). Power Pivot lets users quickly sift and filter through 100 million rows of data.  Other new things coming include slicers, new chart types, and spark lines. For more on Power Pivot see the SQL Server Magazine interview with Donald Farmer at http://www.sqlmag.com/Article/ArticleID/102613/sql_server_102613.html .

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