Sharepoint 2010: Clouds Can Wait

Last week together with Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010 was officially released. Of course, this is an important event for Enterprise 2.0 industry, however, not so important as we expected. Because despite the fact that Sharepoint 2010 was introduced as a cloud solution, at the moment neither Hosted, nor SaaS version of Sharepoint 2010 are not available. Hosted version (in BPOS-D) will be available only by the end of the year. SaaS-version (Sharepoint Online) by the end of the year will will be available for beta testing and official release is expected only in mid-2011. (We included Sharepoint Online in our Top 10 cloud platforms for Enterprise, but apparently that was too early). And now about the positive moments: Sharepoint 2010 really contains a lot of improvements that will strengthen its (almost monopolistic) position of the intranet platforms market:




Social







- New rich user profiles


- Social connections with colleagues


- Activity streams


- Tags and notes on each page


- Page rating



- People search by knowledge and interests





Mobile







- Mobile access to shared documents


- Mobile document viewer


- Pages optimization for mobile access


- Mobile notifications


- Sending messages and pictures to the personal activity stream from mobile device


- Even more features for Windows Phone 7





Office 2010 integration







- Pulling social information from Sharepoint by Outlook Social Connector


- Offline access via SharePoint Workspace (former MS Office Groove)


- Document collaboration using Office Web Apps


- Web viewer for Visio diagrams


- Broadcasting PowerPoint presentations via Sharepoint-intranet




Content Management







- Support for document and records management


- Page metadata management


- Content Organizer


- Much improved Search (integrated FAST Search)


- CMIS support (soon)


- Improved support for external data sources through Business Connectivity Services




User Interface







- New Ribbon interface utilizing Ajax


- Firefox and Safari support


- Improved WYSIWYG-editor


- It's very easy to embed pictures and videos




Development







- Out-of-the-box Silverlight Web Parts support


- Explorer for Sharepoint sites


- Web Part visual editor


- A bunch of wizards, including these for working with workflows and external data


- Developer Dashboard panel for debugging Web Parts

See also: Top 10 Enterprise Portals