SharePoint 2010: Promising Preview

SharePoint has evolved significantly over the past decade from a simple intranet/extranet content management tool set to include functionality from business intelligence to corporate social networking. Microsoft is touting the 2010 release as its biggest Server product release ever. From my perspective, here are some of the top enhancements:

1. Business Connectivity Services (BCS): The ability to access and edit data from external systems using built-in features is absolutely the biggest enhancement. While SharePoint 2007 could only retrieve data (editing was a custom development job), the 2010 release supports editing without writing custom code or installing external plug-ins. This bi-directional ability dramatically increases both productivity and the scope of what the system can do out of the box.
   
   
2. Elegant and Intuitive Designer Tools: The look and feel of SharePoint applications have been a sore point for sometime now. Starting with 2007, complete page layout freedom was given to .Net developers. However, with 2010, both SharePoint Designer and the Visual Studio extension have been dramatically improved. The simplicity and elegance of the ribbon-like contextual menu makes design and development a whole lot neater.
   
   
3. Search: The FAST search feature is simple and intuitive. The Bing-like interface with an ability to preview documents in-place as well as shortlist by a variety of filters (some of which are automatically and intuitively generated meta data) makes finding information a whole lot easier. The capability to index both structured and unstructured data (with minimal customization) will allow information to be found from many more places.
   
   
4. Deeper Integration with Office: Once you find what you’re looking for, you can edit Office documents in place without leaving the browser. The versioning and history is essentially taken care of automatically; this could be a huge time saver for end users. Further, cutting and pasting between Office applications like Word/Excel and SharePoint will be much less of a hassle.
   
   
5. Workflow Enhancements: Custom workflows can now be created with SharePoint Designer without custom code. These templates can be easily imported into Visual Studio for further enhancements. Additionally, Visio documents can now be opened and edited in browser in real-time (without a Visio installation on the end user's computer); interesting, to say the least.
   
   
6. Business Intelligence (BI): The BI Server was earlier sold as a separate product whereas it is now included as a part of SharePoint Enterprise Server. The claim is that users will easily be able to assemble dashboards to analyze data from disparate systems; sounds promising.
   
   
7. Corporate Social Networking: A lot of excitement here. The community features will analyze data from user profiles, Outlook accounts, organization positions, project involvement, and areas of interest to update and connect people.
   
   
8. Browser Compatibility: The range of browsers that will be able to render SharePoint sites properly now includes FireFox and Safari. This will come as a big relief to many IT departments and end-users alike who will be less constrained by browser requirements.

What I've described here is just a tip of the iceberg. The product's value to a firm could increase exponentially as data from disparate applications can easily be brought into one place, and then shared and modified using its toolkit. At Trioro, we are quite excited about this release and look forward to uncovering its full potential.

The Sound of Found (Bing!) with SharePoint 2010 ?

Honestly, we all are guilty of wasting a little time. But what about when you’re actually trying to get something done?! According to IDC, the information worker spends an average of 3.5 hours looking for information and not finding it. Further, an average of 2.2 hours is spent on versioning issues and an additional 3 hours is spent on recreating content. If you add it up, more than nine hours a week are spent on low value tasks. For business owners and managers, this could amount to over $13K for an employee who makes $60K.

Microsoft is aiming to solve part of this issue with its improved search and tighter integration with Office in SharePoint 2010. First, an easy to use visual Bing-like interface of the FAST Search feature provides centralized and contextual results that includes documents, people, and other unstructured information. Further, a number of external sources can now be easily added and indexed. Additionally, the phonetic search engine seems to do a pretty good job of returning relevant results even if you make spelling mistakes.

With easy to use filters on the left navigation, search results can be short-listed quickly by document type, author, job titles, project, tags, etc. Each filter also displays a count of results for better information. Microsoft appears to have made improvements in the way meta data is generated, handled and managed thereby increasing relevance of search results. Importantly, the social behavior of the users has an impact on the relevance of the results returned. (See search demo)

What's cool is a preview feature that allows you to slide through documents in place. Once you’ve determined it’s the right one, depending on the format, you could edit the file right in the browser; the version issues are taken care of by SharePoint. Besides Enterprises, SharePoint could start to make economic sense pretty quickly even for SMBs .

However, a search engine is fueled by data. And data is fueled by people and processes. How your data is captured, processed, and managed play a crucial role in this equation. You might know what you're craving for and the ingredients might be available but hitting the spot largely depends on the recipe.