Microsoft is to announce the launch of SharePoint 2010 on May 12th at 11:00 a.m. EST. Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division will deliver a keynote speech for the launch that will focus on the next wave of productivity offered by Microsoft. This new wave of productivity is concentrated heavily on IT choice, and flexibility.
SharePoint 2010 offers several enhancements from the collaborative features of SharePoint 2007. The ten enhanced features below make SharePoint 2010 arguably the top software solution for business collaboration:
1. Content Management-Each SharePoint user in your intranet business group can create their own profile page, with personal and work information, ongoing profile management, managed tags, notes, filtering and sorting, etc…
2. Calendar-In SharePoint 2010, a mash-up feature is added where the calendar from the Microsoft Exchange Server can be blended with the SharePoint calendar. Utilizing an AJAX foundation, the user interface of SharePoint calendar is enhanced.
3. Better Social/Employee Connectivity-SharePoint 2010 features a “My Network” portion, where users can track their colleagues and interests. It even includes a “Note Board” where you can leave a note on a colleague’s profile or comment on a team’s site.
4. Wikis-In SharePoint 2010’s new page model, content is much more manageable. Enhancements include a new rich text editor, links insertion, and a discussions feature.
5. People Search-People search helps users find colleagues with the skills and expertise they seek. Other users can be sorted by “social distance”, project skills, responsibilities and management chains.
6. Micro-blogging-Enhancements include advanced authoring features, multi-browser capabilities, unified viewing of peer updates, notification alerts, and reply capabilities to community activities. Micro-blog searching, streaming events activity and the ability to include images, videos, and audio have also been added.
7. Group Authentication-By using constructs from email distribution lists, business systems lines, and SharePoint itself, group authentication based on email distribution lists is available.
8. Co-authoring-Mobile business collaboration with SharePoint 2010 allows users to access team sites, office applications, post blogs, comment on other blogs, play video, and click to documents, sites, and colleague profiles.
9. Cross Content Searching-SP 2010 allows for searching across multiple sites, filtering results by a variety of different parameters including: type, author, date and tag. It’s even possible to create an alert or RSS feed on a particular search query.
Communities-SharePoint 2010 makes it easy to set-up communities. Opt-ion membership, aggregated events, easy administration and community recommendations are a few of the new community business collaboration features.
As businesses anticipate the May 12th release of SharePoint 2010, and Office 2010, it’s clear that Microsoft is poised to usher in a new arena of business collaboration, flexible productivity, and custom IT choices for business. SharePoint 2010 will change the face of business collaboration.