WCM is Better in SharePoint 2010 - Is it Enough?

The SharePoint 2010 release is just around the corner and there's been a lot of chatter about SharePoint’s new capabilities — especially those relating to web content management. Given SharePoint 2007's weakness in the Web CMS area people are naturally curious how the 2010 release stacks-up. In this article, I peel the onion on the new SharePoint web content management capabilities, and how the product might serve your organization’s strategic web objectives.

SharePoint 2010's Core Capabilities

Let's begin our discussion by reviewing, at a very high level, what specific business problems SharePoint was meant to solve.

Microsoft designed SharePoint as a collaboration platform to address specific business needs, such as collaboration, secure portals, data integration, document management, records management, search and discovery, etc. Further to this, the platform offers robust APIs, which allow extension of the base platform to third party solutions that address specific business needs for corporations in the mid to enterprise markets.

SharePoint is generally viewed in the market as an Enterprise Content Management platform with enriched web editing capabilities. It also offers some capacity for consistent branding and layouts across the organization.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Core Components

What's New In SharePoint 2010?

SharePoint 2010 is being bundled with a lot of new features and capabilities. In this article we will focus on the capabilities that add value for an organization considering using SharePoint 2010 for their website. For the complete list of new capabilities please visit Microsoft's SharePoint portal site.

User Experience Improvements

The Microsoft SharePoint team has finally added the popular ribbon editing control to the platform. This makes content editing easy and more intuitive for end users. SharePoint will also support inline editing with the new release. The AJAX enabled editing experience will greatly enhance the user experience on the SharePoint platform.

Editor's Note: Also read: 8 Ways Web Content Management has Improved in SharePoint 2010

Improved Taxonomy, Metadata

Keeping in line with the growing need for well-structured taxonomy on a website, SharePoint 2010 now includes Managed Meta Data Services that allows the creation and management of Meta tags across multiple sites.

Editor's Note: For more information on Metadata in SharePoint 2010, read: Overview: SharePoint 2010 Metadata and Taxonomy Management and Jeff Carr's series starting with: SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Controlled Vocabulary for Content Enrichment.

Audience Targeting

Meta data tagged content can be further used to dynamically position content for the site audience, using the new Audience Object Model. Audience objects will allow us to target specific content to the target visitor segment thereby making their experience on your site more effective. We believe this is a great feature for content re-purposing and will enhance usability experience, especially for e-Publication sites or the resource section of any site.

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Tags: document management, enterprise cms, sharepoint, sharepoint 2010, web cms, web publishing

The SharePoint 2010 release is just around the corner and there's been a lot of chatter about SharePoint’s new capabilities -- especially those relating to web content management. Given SharePoint 2007's weakness in the Web CMS area people are naturally curious how the 2010 release stacks-up. In this article, I peel the onion on the new SharePoint web content management capabilities, and how the product might serve your organization’s strategic web objectives.