SharePoint 2010: Experts Dish on the Good and Not So Good

By Toby Ward (@tobyward) Jun 9, 2010

4 comments

Like a dish detergent spun through the rebranding cycle, SharePoint 2010 (news, site) is all new and improved. The enhancements though to the World’s most popular and prevalent web development platform — nee portal platform; nee enterprise content management platform; nee Microsoft’s answer to Lotus Notes / WebSphere — are far more impressive than your standard “new and improved” detergent in a bigger box. SharePoint’s box is bigger, but there is substance to the improvements above and beyond the style.

SharePoint 2010 (SP2010) has not been reconstructed, and is not the best solution for any organization in any scenario — it can be expensive, very expensive, and it contains far more than most organizations will ever use. But, the enhancements are more than cosmetic with impressive additions and upgrades to the feature set — when compared to MOSS 2007.

With all of SP’s features and functions — hundreds of them — what is it really good for? What are its strengths and weaknesses, and what type of organization makes a good fit for SP, or vice versa?

What the SharePoint Experts Say

We’ve taken a birds-eye approach to SP2010 with a look to the expert perspective. I asked three SP experts to weigh in with their thoughts on SP2010’s strengths and weaknesses:

Shawn Shell, author of the SharePoint Report for CMSWatch, and CEO of Consejo Inc.
Robert Bogue, CEO of Thor Projects, and a SharePoint MVP
Andrew Connell, author, trainer, and co-founder of Critical Path Training

Somewhat surprisingly, though not entirely given the breadth of services offered by SP2010, each expert cites different strengths and weaknesses, with very little overlap.

On The Plus Side of SharePoint 2010

My Profiles (formerly My Sites) — including more social media and better associations between individuals.
Office integration — Better integration with MS Office particularly for Access and Excel Services — improving the supportability of those inevitable Access applications.
Business Intelligence — Impressive upgrades to dashboard reporting and monitoring through Excel services.
Service Application architecture — Moving away from the Shared Services model and to independent service applications.
Developer Story — Across the board the story for development with SharePoint is better. Better tooling. Better APIs. Better materials.
External Connectivity — BDC is now part of SharePoint Foundation as Business Connectivity Services (BCS) with more powerful connectivity and workflow. For example, expense reports can be done in SharePoint and automatically imported into the accounting system; purchase orders can be routed through approvals before automatically being created.
SharePoint Designer — A full-fledged SharePoint editor that knows and understands SharePoint, not just an HTML editor. Administrators have control of whether SharePoint Designer can be used or not for individual sites, and can control which features are enabled.
Offline Support via SharePoint Workspace — Previous support for offline work was limited or only available via a 3rd party solution. SharePoint 2010 is now a platform for retrieving data while you’re offline as well as posting new data while offline.
Trusted code, Cleaner code — Code can be run against SharePoint data in a trusted way, and applications can be built client side. Out-of-the-box sites now generate much cleaner mark-up (well-formed XHTML; table-less markup), are accessible (WCAG 2.0 AA) and are much lighter (refactored markup, compressed JavaScript & CSS files).
SharePoint Online (hosting) — SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management sites can be deployed to the cloud and avoid up-front licensing, hardware and staffing costs.