As you probably know, the Beta version of SharePoint 2010 has been released and the reviews are starting to come in. In general, the consulting community is giving SharePoint 2010 very high marks, and we're looking forward to seeing it implemented by clients later this year.
In this series of blogs, I'll take a hands-on test drive of the initial SharePoint 2010 Beta release and will highlight 5-10 features that I feel could be valuable for a typical organization. While this won't be a deep dive of the functionality, it should give you an idea of the new concepts and features and how leveraging 2010 may help you solve a business problem or achieve a business goals.
Social Computing
Microsoft made some huge strides with enhancing SharePoint's Social Computing functionality in 2010. SharePoint 2010 gives companies considering a Social Computing strategy an easy initial step for introducing and testing Social Computing concepts inside their firewall. Here are a couple highlights new in SharePoint 2010.
More Power in My Sites
In general, you'll see a lot of functionality that might be familiar from Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter. As you use your organizations SharePoint portal, you'll notice your activities will be tracked and made available for your coworkers to browse. Tweets are handled using Micro-blogging features allowing you to post comments on "what you're doing now" on your SharePoint profile page for accessed by your other team members. There are also some nice features that encourage more collaboration by prominently displaying areas you have expertise in (ie – "Ask Me About") letting coworkers post questions on your profiles note board for you to answer. For most people comfortable with posting to a Facebook wall this will all look familiar and make sense to use as part of their work environment.
Peer voting on Documents
If you've ever used another customer's review when considering an online purchase, you'll understand the value in peer voting on documents. Now users can rate documents in the portal using a five star rating system. Looking for a way to search for the best rated documents for certain subjects? Ratings are stored in site columns allowing users to search or sort by documents that have received a minimum rating level giving them access to the highest quality information on their portal.
Usability
Overall, we saw significant increases in usability with SharePoint 2010. For most companies this should translate into faster and more efficient maintenance of the portal and quicker adoption by the average user.
The new ribbon tool bar adds consistency between SharePoint navigation and Office 2007 and 2010 applications. Our first impression was using SharePoint for the average user would be more intuitive. Functionality is now grouped under a few logical areas and displayed in a more prominent area on the screen instead of hidden or buried like MOSS. Right away we noticed some big improvements navigating around and just checking out what SharePoint 2010 had to offer.
Business Intelligence
Dashboards are quickly becoming key component to corporate Portals. SharePoint 2010 provides tighter integration with PerformancePoint, Excel Services and now Visio Services. For end users, this delivers a much more powerful Business Intelligence engine. It also wraps it with some very flexible visualization features that allow your portal users to interact directly with your data.
PerformancePoint
Microsoft made a big strategic move last year by discontinuing PerformancePoint as a separate standalone product in April 2009 and wrapping it into the SharePoint 2007 Enterprise license. Now they've better integrated functionality into SharePoint 2010 allowing a powerful dashboarding platform including very robust scorecard functionality. The new PerformancePoint also includes more intuitive features for drilling down and interacting with the dashboards data through features like the new decomposition trees as well as integration with Excel Services and now Visio Services.
Improved Excel Services
While we leveraged past versions of Excel Services with SharePoint 2007 to create some pretty interesting dashboard designs, we definitely had to work around the limitations of Excel Services to create some very basic dashboard views. In very simple terms, data and Excel functionality for the dashboards had to be kept very simple or "dumbed down" to be presented in SharePoint using the OTTB method. Not anymore, Excel Services has really grown up with SharePoint 2010. New Ajax functionality gives users the ability to scroll, refresh, edit Excel grids directly in the page and greatly increase the overall user interaction. The implementation of concepts like Sparklines give you new flexibility for elegantly adding visual meaning to your data and reports.
Here's an example of a Sparkline with the line graphs displayed in the right hand column:
Workflows
Flexibility in Developing Workflows
With the previous versions of SharePoint, you were usually required to make an upfront decision how a new workflow would be developed (Out of the Box, SharePoint Designer, Totally Custom). As the workflow was put to use, new requirements quickly surfaced. Suddenly you may have run into roadblocks when trying to customize your solution. This was especially true if you chose a no-code solution like SharePoint Designer to create the initial workflow. Extending the solution or adding additional complexity at a later time could be extremely challenging and sometimes require "tearing out" your current workflow and creating it totally custom.
With 2010, you have some options to "organically grow" your workflow from simple to complex without rebuilding from scratch. This seems to be a more realistic approach to a workflow's life cycle from the initial idea stage of automating some daily tasks to development of a full-fledged mission critical workflow that includes customization. Migrate your workflow idea from a Visio workflow diagram, to a functioning no-code SharePoint Designer design, to a customized Visual Studio solution without the past "gotchas" associated with starting with a SharePoint Workflow Design.
Workflow Visualization
Workflows now include user friendly features such as a way to visually track workflow progress and instantly assess the current status of a workflow. Now workflows visualization diagrams can be used to communicate issues or hang-ups with a business process, or just to more clearly track a workflow status at any given time. As a simple method for encouraging adoption when automating key business processes, this small piece of functionality goes a long way.
