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.

Top Universities reach the world with Online Service

The Globe and Mail recently reported on an initiative called OpenCourseWare lead by MIT and other top U.S. schools, such as Stanford and Berkeley. This is a great example of using internet technology to increase the power of an organizations offering.

You may be wondering, why would MIT, or the other 100 universities worldwide, give away all this course material for free, how is that a worthwhile offering? (You still actually need to go to MIT to get a degree – that cannot be done online)

Here is my take:

Awareness & Trial: Placing valuable content online will drive a huge number of people to the MIT site and allow them to get a taste of the quality of the education. This will likely result in much larger and global audience with significantly more impact than any advertisement could. Only internet technology has the power to enable a program with this much reach.

Prestige: MIT and others are in the business of prestige. They need to be at the forefront of knowledge, recruiting the best professors, only taking the best students, and making sure everyone knows they are the best. By broadening the audience of a professor from a lecture hall to the world, these universities will be able to empower their professors to make an even bigger impact and garner more prestige. This might even result in better teaching if reputations start being made off of courses and not just research/publications.

Furthermore, many of the users of these materials are professors and students at other institutions, who are adapting their teaching/courses to the MIT material. This is a huge compliment that only increases the allure of MIT. (If properly cited – of course)

Usability will be critical: For both the end user and the professor/administrator an easy to use system will be critical. For the end-user it is straightforward, if you can’t easily understand and navigate through the material then the experience will degrade, not enhance, the perception of the university.

For professors/administrators the time spent maintaining the courseware catalogue could be a significant cost in terms of time and distraction if it’s not designed to fit well with how these staff members operate.

There are many content management systems out there that could theoretically “do the job”, after all it’s just posting text, documents, and video to a website … right? Not quite. To create a system that really hits the mark and makes it easy for both the users and professors, they will need to develop a custom system. That’s why in Stanford’s Open CouseWare Business plan they call for a custom web application, and Berkeley is focusing on an automated system to record and post lectures.

Globe&Mail Article