Enhancing Your SharePoint Experience

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.

This week Dosensio got a chance to attend a meeting held by the SharePoint Business Strategies User Group of Chicago.

The meeting was organized by Ross Freedman of RightPoint Consulting. Directions Training, who co-sponsored it, also provided free food and drinks; something always much appreciated by overworked entrepreneurs. It was hosted by Microsoft at their offices in the Aon Center.

Dan Vandercar from Microsoft introduced the audience to the Microsoft PerformancePoint Server, which is now part of the enterprise version of the Microsoft SharePoint Server. He demonstrated how business data (such as sales figures) can be extracted from different sources, analyzed and turned into compelling financial presentations. Live graphs and tables can be hosted on SharePoint sites so everyone with just a web browser has access to the data.