Best of SharePoint 2010

Matt Morse and Hersh Ajgaonkar of PointBridge provided a great overview of SharePoint 2010’s new features and improvements. Here are some the highlights:

Office documents can be viewed and edited directly in the web browser without requiring the installation of any software on the client. Matt mentioned that this will also enable editing documents at the same time. Concurrent editing will even work if one user is working with an Office 2010 rich desktop client. Microsoft is clearly closing the gap on web applications such as Google Apps or Zoho.

The new Office 2010 applications will be even more SharePoint aware, which includes the ability to view and edit meta data directly with Excel or Word for instance.

With the introduction of the Client Object Model, which allows client applications to more easily interact with SharePoint via either .NET, JavaScript or REST, Microsoft clearly acknowledges a trend towards more complex SharePoint applications that live on the desktop. The new flagship in this department will be Groove’s successor SharePoint Workspace, which provides the user with a rich Outlook-like client for SharePoint. According to Matt it will feature a sophisticated synchronization feature, which will only upload those sections of a file to the server that have actually changed. On the downside, these advanced features will likely mean that SharePoint Workspace will not be compatible with earlier versions of SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept called Document Sets. The purpose is to group different content types that may share meta data. Matt showed an example of a contract document set, which contains other types such as a master service agreement and contract changes. All documents in this set would share a meta data field called ‘client’. The set can be treated like some kind of virtual folder, which when modified will propagate any contained documents.

Another area that has been beefed up is that of records managements, which will allow SharePoint users to declare any content a record in place, without having to duplicate documents in separate data repositories. Retention policies can be defined separately for regular documents and records. The overlay icon used to indicate documents turned into records is a yellow lock.

After acquiring the FAST search technology in 2008 Microsoft will be offering a fully integrated FAST Search for SharePoint server, which substantially augments the built-in search capabilities.

SharePoint 2010 will only run on 64 bit versions of Windows Server 2008, Hersh revealed that even SharePoint developer tools will require a 64 bit operating system.