We think SharePoint is the most exciting Microsoft technology available today.  We’ve helped many clients get get their intranets underway, using the technology that in many cases they already own.  More and more of our clients use the document management features to share documents, track updates and access them over the internet.  They use workflows to manage business processes ranging for staff leave through to accounts payable and job orders, and that’s just scratching the surface.

So, it’s with huge interest that we look at the next iteration of SharePoint – 2010.  There are’s a lot that’s familiar, and a lot that’s new, more than we can cover in a single posting so we’ll do a series of articles revealing the new capabilities that make SharePoint even better. 

One thing is for sure – if you aren’t using SharePoint in your business, there is a very strong possibility that you are missing out.

Our first impressions:

User Interface – In many ways it’s an evolutionary improvement rather than revolutionary – and that’s good.  The screens seem tidier and the Office ribbon is introduced.  The menus are more consistent and the overall impression is that things are cleaner and less cluttered.  But it’s not all good news -- I found the actions and settings option in SharePoint 2007 very logical, and the ribbon on first glance does make it harder to find things. 

Metadata – This is almost completely new.  There is a huge emphasis on “tags”, which are then used heavily in the search function for finding data.  SharePoint introduces tag taxonomies and “folksonomies” – the first being a managed structure of tags, the second being more ad-hoc.  By having content ‘owners’ (the person who provided the content) as well as site visitors contribute tags and ratings to sites, the search engine should be able to better identify relevant content and structured search results.  When you submit documents into SharePoint, there is more emphasis on meta tagging, and this is used heavily.  For example you can tag whole sets of documents – for example all documents relating to a project – and then manage documents with those tags as a single entity if you wish.  This is a critical feature that makes structuring document storage considerably easier.  You can be more ad-hoc, like the real world, and use tags to very easily develop complex interactions where required.

Users can also ‘bookmark’ sites – which is a bit like ‘digg this’ or ‘del.ico.us’ – this fits within the ‘My Site’ tools within SharePoint – we’re divided as to how useful this might be in a small business, and it’s an intriguing development.  The whole ‘my site’ tool loks more and more like facebook, with personal blog options, status updates, noteboards and such like.  It’ll even try to build ‘expertise tagging’ around people and it’ll go as far as looking at your ‘sent items’ to predict and suggest tags – we can see advantages and disadvantages in ‘My Sites’.

Advanced Routing – One key benefit of the metadata is the ability to create workflow rules that let user simply submit files to a site, and then SharePoint will store the document in the correct library and/or directory based simply on rules – using the tags and other descriptors – we see this as being particularly useful, making it much easier for users to save documents and find them again.

In Place Records Management – with all these documents stored in the SharePoint system, along with many variations and versions, sometimes it’ll be hard to track down the ‘official’ version.  So now you can flag a document as ‘official’, and that will lock it down, make it easier to find, and you can have compliance rules, for example around retention, to meet any audit or similar requirements.

Lists – the key construct of SharePoint content are enhanced – firstly there are new options including validation of data.  We noticed ‘inline editing’ which is going to be hugely useful, and there is a link to creating custom views in SharePoint Designer – that was always possible in SharePoint 2007 but you had to start in SharePoint Designer and it was more ‘expert only’ – now that’s miles more accessible.  And we saw some AJAX options hiding in one of the menus.

“Surfacing” (Edit Page) – is also improved – there are easier options for adding media including video – (no linger do you need to resort to the content editor) – now a simple wizard.  You can create lists directly in the edit screen which will streamline the process of creating sites.  We noticed more emphasis on Wikis and Blogs, and these use the ribbon bar for editing, with ‘live preview’ options just like Office itself.

These are just the first impressions.  There is a great deal to explore, and we’re looking forward in particular to investigating the ‘Business Connectivity Services’ which are the tools for linking to external databases.  We’ll tell you more as we discover it!