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Get the NewsletterSharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform
100 million licenses and 4,000 partners later, Microsoft thinks they have a handle on this SharePoint phenonemon (news, site). There's been a lot of talk about the next release, much speculation. Now Microsoft gives us a bird's eye view into what SharePoint 2010 is really going to look and behave like. Time to take a little tour.
Okay, so you go away for a couple of days and a sneak peek on SharePoint 2010 hits the wire. Considering the number of people who have been waiting for this moment, it may have been worth it to wait a day or so to get a glimpse of the community's thoughts and views on what they have seen.
A New Way of Looking at SharePoint?
Remember how Microsoft envisioned SharePoint 2007?
SharePoint 2007
Well, the world of SharePoint has changed, slightly:
SharePoint 2010
If you compare these two diagrams, what you see is that it becomes less about the technology capabilities (i.e. content management, collaboration, search, business intelligence) and more about how these technologies support the user or the business: communities, content, insights.
Does this mean there's a big difference between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007? Time will tell. But if you watched the overview video, you'd see things have certainly improved in many instances. Here's what we took away from the overview of SharePoint 2010.
UI Improvements
SharePoint 2010
Multi-Browser Support
Microsoft says they recognize the need to support multiple browsers such as Safari and FireFox. The video even demos SharePoint in FireFox, so you know it's not all talk.
Ribbon
You first saw the introduction of the ribbon UI in Office 2007 and although it took a little getting use to, it grew on you. That ribbon UI is part of SharePoint 2010. It's contextual, so it changes as required and it grays out the options in the ribbon that you may not have access to.
SharePoint 2010 Ribbon UI
Of course, if you don't like it, you can choose to use the old UI from SharePoint 2007.
Dialogs
Now SharePoint will have real dialog boxes, instead of redirects to another web page with your dialog box options. The background is grayed out when a dialog box pops up. Much more in tune with the way web applications work today.
Live Preview & Themes
The ability to set a theme for your look and feel within SharePoint is improved. Included is the ability to take your PowerPoint theme and upload and apply it to your SharePoint site.
If you are modifying a web page, you now have Live Preview capability, so you can see how the change will look before you actually accept it.
Silverlight
SharePoint 2010 comes with out of the box Silverlight web parts, making the inclusion of Silverlight apps much easier. Note the change to the how you can select new web parts for your pages, much improved.
SharePoint 2010 - Silverlight Web Parts
Empowering the Business
There are a couple of different ways to look at SharePoint 2010. Although the developer perspective is important, maybe the most critical is how it makes the lives of business users easier and lets them do more without the need for IT assistance.
Visio Integration
Use Visio 2010 for documenting and describing business processes? Now you can publish those diagrams directly to SharePoint with the back end connection remaining intact. So the view of the diagram is real time. What's nice about this capability is that not everyone needs to have a license for Visio to see the diagram.
SharePoint 2010 Visio Integration
SharePoint Designer
It's still free, but looks very much improved with new modeling capabilities and enhanced workflow.
SharePoint Designer 2010
Now if you are one of those who worry about the power SharePoint Designer provides the power user, this may worry you more. We need to get a closer look at this tool to see if any of these concerns have been eased. This overview doesn't provide that warm and fuzzy feeling.
Business Connectivity Services
The evolution of the BDC, the BCS is very much improved enabling you to connect Line of Business applications, web services and databases to SharePoint easily using the new SharePoint Designer, as well as Visual Studio 2010.
SharePoint 2010 - Business Connectivity Services
You can even take this a step further and connect your Office 2010 applications to the BCS providing a tightly integrated connection with business data.
SharePoint Workspace
Take your SharePoint content offline with the SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove), a rich client to work with while you aren't connected.
SharePoint 2010 - Workspaces
Search
The addition of FAST to SharePoint gives a much improved search experience. Microsoft says their goal is to help you get the "right results on the first page". Those results include not only SharePoint content, but possibly business data and people — the Rich People Search Function from SharePoint 2007 will comes with SharePoint 2010.
Community Feedback
Despite this look into the SharePoint 2010, it seems to be very quiet so far in the greater SharePoint community. Sure, lots of people are pointing to the videos, some even saying things are looking pretty good, but we've haven't been able to dig up any real reviews or thoughts.
Perhaps many are waiting until the CTP arrives sometime this fall before they dig and really say what they think. Or maybe they are waiting for even more details to come from the SharePoint Conference in October. Truth is, although this is nice look into SharePoint 2010, much of what they talk about we already knew was coming in the first place.
There are three video to look at. This is just a snapshot of things in the overview video. Discussing Developer and IT improvements deserves its own article. Stay tuned.
Editor's Note: When you've finished with this review, head over and read about some of the IT professional and developer changes for SharePoint 2010.
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What about BI? any of those videos don't talk about Excel services or Report Server integration….
Barb,
Great insight. You're right, most posts on the subject haven't gone in depth. You cover the video well, so that it both makes me want to watch it more and, yet, not need to!
Tom
In the Overview video they discuss the Insights briefly of which business intelligence is a core part. But specifics on Excel Services or Report Server I don't recall hearing - it was either too quick and wasn't mentioned at all.
Excellent overview. Thanks! I find that the SharePoint 2010 interfaces above remind me a bit of the Sitecore CMS. They've been using the ribbon UI for some time now.
Very good overview. I agree with some of your analysis and have some thoughts of my own on what I've seen and heard.
I have a review on my site about SharePoint 2010 and how it will work (or not) in the Enterprise. You can find the article at seekomega.com
Barb, I'm trying to reach you to see if you'd consider submitting a book chapter to a project. I saw your posts on perpetual beta and on the adoption issues for E2.0. Both topics would be perfect for this. Please contact me. Unfortunately the deadline is tight but you already have a base piece from which to work. Many thanks. (brandacity)
Any idea if SharePoint 2010 will work with Outlook 2010 with full access to edit documents? The current read only mode in Outlook is really limiting. If they'd allow us to edit docs from Outlook out of the box, it would make our workflow much better.
Thank very much for your review.
Most exciting: SharePoint 2010 external list and Business Connectivity Services (BCS)!
If you like the new SharePoint 2010 external list feature and the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and want to make use of something similar in SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0 to connect SharePoint lists (no web parts) directly to external data sources (with change workflow), please take a look at:
http://www.layer2.de/en/products/Pages/SharePoint-Business-Data-List-Connector.aspx
Funnily enough, MS has decided to play word games again by redefining what “collaboration” means. If you look at the SharePoint team blog, they go to great pains to emphasize that “collaboration” does not simply mean “intranet”.
Looking at the information released at the SP conference last week, you can see that MS is on an aggressive campaign to challenge companies like Forrester and Gartner by questioning the concept of CMS as we know it. By asserting that SP 2010 is a platform, not a single-use tool, you can see a new competitive angle being developed at Redmond.
Where with 2007, the product was described as a “swiss army knife”, we can see 2010 becoming more of a “Snap On Tool”, a general platform where specialized functions can be added-on and used to great effect depending on end-user need.
In the area of CMS, the now product-wide emphasis on metadata and search have subtly and decisively announced to the CMS community “MS is here, and in force”. Gartner describes 2010 as an “incremental” release from a CMS perspective, in the same manner that one might laconically differentiate a sub-sonic and super-sonic speed aircraft.
Ironically, MS has made a very quiet but at the same time obvious shift: CMS vendors beware, MS has now decided to play in your space, and has some very nifty tools and a LOT of SP devotees to make that space very crowded indeed.
Great article