Microsoft SharePoint 2010 : A Big Leap Forward!

Sharepoint 2010 was officially released this week. It represents a significant upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 and provides a much friendlier interface for designing and maintaining SP sites. One small enhancement speaks for the rest: no longer will adding an image to a page require a tortuous workflow and the cutting and pasting of urls. In SP 2010, images can be added to a SP page as easily as they can be to any Office document. You simply select INSERT from the ribbon, choose the picture option, browse to the image’s location and click OK. No url’s required!

Key enhancements from ChromaScope’s perspective include:

Search:
Sharepoint search has been dramatically enhanced with features designed to improve searching over large document collections including: improved relevance ranking; better result summaries so that users can more easily identify whether a document is of interest; ‘Refinements’ which automatically determined based on the document set and presented in the Left Hand column (e.g. content type, document dates, document authors and other key metadata) which can be used to navigate and filter through a set of documents. SP 2010 also has “Did You Mean” suggestions and the People Search will search for nicknames and carry out phonetic name matching. In fact there are so many useful new search features that these will be discussed in a later Chromascope post. Also available (at additional cost) is the FAST search server for those requiring enterprise wide search capabilities. FAST is scalable to billions of documents, has the ability to extract metadata for use in searching and provides thumbnail previews of office documents so that users can quickly assess relevance without actually opening the document.

Records Management, Document Retention, Preservation and Legal Hold:
In SP 2010, records management is no longer confined to sites specifically set up to manage records. Records management features – including setting policies for compliance, storage and retention – will be available across all content libraries and sites. For preservation and legal hold, documents can be declared as “records” and locked from future editing or deletion. For preservation and retention purposes, specific workflows can be designed to automatically transfer documents meeting specified criteria to a dedicated document archive.

Office Web Applications:
No longer will it be necessary to have the native applications available to view Office documents stored in Sharepoint. Once produced and uploaded to Sharepoint, they can be viewed and edited in the browser. This immediately makes using Sharepoint on a smart phone (or dare I say, iPad) a viable option as well as facilitating the use of Sharepoint for document review (no need to provide the contract attorneys with desktop copies of office!).

Managed Metadata:
In SP 2010 it is possible to set up and manage centralized taxonomies (e.g. document types, organizational departments, geographic locations, project codes) and deploy these across the entire site collection. This will make it significantly easier to code and tag documents consistently and hence easier to search and retrieve.

Scalability:
It will be possible to scale SP to handle millions of documents. Figures of up to 200 million documents per library are being quoted . This makes SP a viable repository for large scale archiving, records management and document review.

For more information see Microsoft’s own SP 2010 site: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/
(Note: the most useful overview of the new features and functionality can be found in the two downloadable documents: Sharepoint 2010 Evaluation Guide and Sharepoint 2010 Walkthrough Guide).