(LAS VEGAS, NV) If there was one, overarching message delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer in his keynote unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas): SharePoint is no longer just an intranet solution, it’s been architected for all forms of web scenarios.
“SharePoint is one of my favorite Microsoft products…. It’s true,” says Ballmer. “SharePoint, in my estimation, is kind of magical. I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market. It has become a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that were served by niche (products).”
New scenarios include all of the typical intranet scenarios, but all the Internet scenarios they can attack. To drive the point home, Ballmer cited many companies already using MOSS 2007 for their public website including:
В· Kraft Foods (consolidated 200 websites to a single platform saving $2 million per year)
В· Volvo (36 languages, 70 countries)
В· Pfizer
В· Library of Congress
В· Hawaiian Airlines
В· Kroger
В· Conservation International
However, it remains to be seen whether the improvements to MOSS’s web content management will be sufficient to quell the traditional content publishing and management concerns of marketing and communications managers who operate external websites. The new UI for web content management is a marked improvement – in-context editing deploying the ‘ribbon’ UI introduced in Office 2007.
Ballmer announced that MOSS 2010 will public beta test this November (no specific date was delivered). The MS chief also spent a lot of time talking about “the cloud” and was even so bold as to state that “SharePoint is in the center of the cloud.”
“It’s all in the cloud–we certainly agree with that,” said Ballmer, who stressed that SharePoint Online has more than 1 million online users (and 7,000 partners) — including the massive GlaxoSmithKline intranet with 200,000 users. “SharePoint is more capable, more extensible, more Internet & cloud focused. It’s an amazing product.”
NEW FEATURES / TOOLS:
· “Ribbon” interface (in-context editing)
В· “Visual web parts” (“no more hard-coding of web parts”)
В· Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7
В· Access services (publish Access dbases through SP)
В· New sandboxed solutions
В· Integrated rich media & Silverlight
В· Improved Visual Studio & SQL
В· Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design / UI to 2010
В· Improved social computing (blogs, wikis, tagging, ratings, etc)
В· Improved search algorithms and FAST Search integration
В· New site scenarios for:
o Pricing analysis
o Hiring processes
o Citizen management (citizen portals)
o Project tracking
o Sales reporting
o Conference planning
o Delivery scheduling
o Compliance review sites
SOCIAL COMPUTING
“We needed to facilitate this next generation of social computing,” stated Ballmer, though not convincingly, when asked about the improvements on social media – a notorious weakness of the MOSS 2007 platform. “We’ve done this with My Sites, mashing-up, etc. I think we’ve moved towards 3.0.”
Improvements to the highly criticized social computing of MOSS include:
- Better blogs, wikis, calendars
- Co-authoring
- Content tagging
- Tag clouds
- Ratings
- Bookmarks
- MySites “Smart Profiles” and feeds
- Browse colleagues and experts
- “Share This Site.”
“There isn’t an enterprise on the planet that doesn’t want to embrace social computing, but they worry about how to do it,” explained Ballmer. “If we can show a path to CEOs and CIOs that we can let people interact with each other the way they want to (and still protect privacy and security) then they will embrace social computing.”
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Improvements to ECM include:
В· Document management: The ceiling limit on a document library moves to 10 million, and within a site collection, to hundreds of millions of documents; no longer will you have to right click to bring up the actions / options of a document, the ribbon hosts all of the options / actions the user needs
В· Taxonomy management: you will be able to have consistent content types taxonomy across server farms (applied at the document level)
В· Pictures: photos no longer have to be in an SP library, but can be uploaded from your hard drive
В· The addition of true Digital Asset Management
GOVERNANCE
Perhaps the biggest criticism or flaw of SharePoint has been the issue of governance, which Microsoft has only addressed half-heartedly, as reflected in Tom Rizzo’s comments: “There’s a lot we’re doing on governance, but its only 20% software, and 80% process,” says Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint. “We’ve invested a lot in best practices, centers of excellence. We’ll continue to invest, but I think we’re still need near the beginning, than the end.” In other words, governance is more the client’s responsibility than Microsoft’s.
SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE STATISTICS:
В· 7.5 miles of network cable
· 7,400 participants (up from 3,800) – 94% growth
В· 297 world class speakers
В· 70 countries
В· 165 sponsors
В· 300+ hours
В· 240 sessions
В· 45+ hours of hands-on labas
В· 18 customer sessions (Delloite)
В· 2 SharePoint marriages
В· Biggest Beach Party ever by Mandalay with Huey Lewis & The News
Follow my SharePoint conference updates on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TobyWard
We implemented Sharepoint back in 2003 with Microsoft pledging their support as we tested it. They promised more document management and pledged their support. We bought, they bailed. We just ripped it out this year. Search was pathetic (better off buying a third party solution like Coveo) and the overall performance was painfully slow. Cripes, you needed a separate server for every frick'n task. Backup and restore was rudimentary at best, –and you need to buy a separate anti-virus solution! Not worth the money.
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omidiu, part of the Traduceri legalizate team.
Traduceri autorizate
There is no doubt that SharePoint is putting serious effort to become more competitive and all these efforts pay off considering that many intranet networks already go for it. It would be interesting to see a advantages/disadvantages comparison for each content management system, it would be a lot easier for web developers to orientate according to their needs. I know I could use that as I am still searching for the optimum web content management tool for my business.