SharePoint 2010 - 5 Hot Features to Look Forward To

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Feb 4, 2010

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With the release of SharePoint 2010 (news, site) getting closer, people are getting either a) excited, b) nervous or c) all of the above. Whatever your mindset, here are 5 changes coming with SharePoint 2010 which you should take note of.

The Business Collaboration Platform for Enterprise and the Web. You have to roll that over your tongue a few times to get a feel for what it could really mean. A one-stop shop, one solution for all needs or key functionality to help you get the job done.

1. Better Management of Content

This is a fairly broad thing to talk about. We've covered some of the enhancements already:

Metadata and taxonomy improvements: Support for terms and keywords, a new managed metadata service and better tagging features.
Richer records management: New in-place records management and improvements to the records management center, along with a content organizer and compliance details demonstrate support for compliance and eDiscovery.
Management of Digital Assets: Capabilities for managing audio, video and image content types
Content Types: One of the biggest improvements is the ability to define content types and re-use them across site collections, or even farms.

2. Application Integration

Formerly called the BDC (Business Data Connectivity service) in SharePoint 2007, SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is designed to help you connect SharePoint and your business applications and other external data. This includes information that may reside within Web 2.0 services like blogs and wikis.

While the 2007 BDC was a bit of pain to use, the 2010 BCS is designed to be power-user friendly — with SharePoint 2010 you won't have to be a serious developer to take advantage of business data integration. In fact, you can use BCS with SharePoint Designer 2010, something you could not do before.

Speaking of things you couldn't do before, BCS provide read/write capability, so you can read as well as update those external data sources.

SharePoint 2010 — Business Data Connectivity Service

Another nice thing about BCS is that it is available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 (formerly WSS 3.0). The capabilities available within Foundation are only a subset, but enough to enable developers to build solutions that can run on Foundation or SharePoint Server.

3. Social Computing

SharePoint 2007 has some social computing capabilities like blogs and wikis, and there have been a couple of kits released to expand on those. But it needed more. Often those thirsty for more social computing features went shopping with third party providers like Telligent and NewsGator — finding more advanced functionality with those folks.

With SharePoint 2010 social computing has become a primary focus. One of the core spokes on the new SharePoint wheel is communities. And SharePoint is opening the door to a number of new features including richer member profiles, tagging and comments, activity feeds, people search, workspaces and more.