In SharePoint 2007, Microsoft introduced us to the “pie”, a marketecture that described the product. It contained slices cleverly labeled portal, business intelligence, search, enterprise content management, collaboration, and business process.
For SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has focused on deepening the product’s capabilities in all areas of the pie instead of adding new pieces. While the pieces have been renamed, Microsoft made advances and improvements in functionalities across the board. This is a good thing. Customers are already looking forward to the new capabilities enabled in this version of the platform.
Habañero and our clients are most excited about three improvements we think are most noteworthy:
1. New search features
Most organizations have experienced a rapid increase in content in email, file shares, and websites that has made looking for information time consuming and unproductive.
SharePoint 2010 reduces the time it takes for users to get key information and improves organizational insight by offering the following:
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tight integration with FAST, the search company Microsoft recently purchased; enterprise search capabilities now perform on steroids
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enhanced FAST features such as document previewing, meta data extraction, structured data searches, and the ability to create personalized search experiences that take into account a user’s personal profile information
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search facets (called Refiners) that allow you to better dig through your search results for the exact item you are looking for
2. Web 2.0 and the social enterprise
SharePoint 2010 can improve employee engagement, lower risks associated with knowledge loss from the exiting workforce, and generally improve business results with the following features:
- familiar built-in social networking capabilities such as Twitter-like status features (or “What am I doing now?”) and a Facebook-like experience of adding “colleagues”
- content tagging that allows for the creation of a managed global taxonomy or corporate vocabulary and allows users to add items of their own (similar to the flickr folksonomy features)
- simple and rapid tacit knowledge sharing and more real-time communication shared through improved blogs, wikis, and feeds
3. Enterprise content management
Many of the traditional records management products haven’t kept up with the rapid increase in content that exists on team sites, wikis, and email.
More companies are now planning on retiring existing, expensive records management systems given the compelling RM features of SharePoint 2010 that are woven throughout the entire platform:
- greatly expanded capabilities including fileplan management, document archival and disposition capabilities, improved reporting, and “In Place Record Management”
- improved document management user experience and even tighter integration with the desktop
- expanded web content management capabilities, which make it difficult for companies that are Microsoft-centric to choose any other web content management platform
Improvements and enhancements in the new version of SharePoint 2010 offer sizable improvements in all areas. This is most definitely a great time to investigate whether your business can realize the potential benefits of an upgrade.
For more information or to find out how your business can leverage SharePoint 2010, go to www.habaneros.com.
