Some of the New Features of SharePoint 2010 – from SPC09
If you didn’t already know, this week is SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. Three of Springhouse’s employees are there learning about all of the new features that will be part of SharePoint 2010.
Some bits and pieces of information from the conference have made their way back to our offices and I wanted to share these with our readers.
So here we go!
Terminology: New Ways to Say the Same Thing
Like with any new release, there comes new lingo, phrases, vocab, terminology, or even headaches (if you want to call it that). So get ready to re-learn some of the terminology used in previous versions of SharePoint and what the new terms will be.
Here are some examples:
| Old Term | New Term |
| Business Intelligence | Insight |
| Collaboration | Community |
| Business Data Catalog (BDC) | Business Connectivity Services (BCS) |
| Content Management, ECM, and WCM | Content |
| Mash Up | Composition |
Changes to the Farm /Architecture / Taxonomy
- Say goodbye to the SPP. That’s right, no more SSP. Most services are now consumable and sharable across web apps and even across farms.
- There is now something known as the Metadata Terms store. Among other things, this means that a lot of the elements that were stored in galleries (site columns, content types, etc.) are no longer held hostage in their respective site collection silos. Create a site column or a content type once, and then reuse it throughout the entire web app (or farm, depending on your preference and the configuration). Good stuff, huh? This will be a significant timesaver!
- Records management can now happen right in the site collections, with or without a Records Center site. You can classify a document in a library as a “Record” and that will lock down pretty much everything about the document. Members can no longer edit/check-out, etc… You need elevated privileges to “un-classify” a record. Of course there is still a Records Center site template for enterprise scenarios.
- No more performance-based recommendations of <2000 items per list container. Lists and libraries now support tens of millions of items.
Ubiquity: Having a presence everywhere
Wikis are now everywhere, and they’re a pretty far cry from the embarrassment they were in MOSS 2007. As one example, Team Sites now employ a wiki web part on their default landing page. The ability to construct relationships between the wiki pages and elements are now GUI driven. You can still use the double brackets to hyperlink a term, but it immediately brings up a navigation element so that you can browse to other pages, images, or whatever you want to link to.
Ratings are everywhere. Looks like SharePoint is finally bringing in a little more of the social aspect by allowing users to rate items within SharePoint, such as: Document libraries, blog posts, etc. It’s the tried and true 5-star layout that everybody is used to. These ratings then become metadata, obviously, so they can be used as criteria for searches, for workflow actions, etc.
The ribbon is also everywhere. It is contextual, customizable, even removable…but out of the box - it’s there, it’s everywhere!
Tag! Your It! You can tag pretty much anything (documents, blog posts, images, people’s MySite, etc…) Your tags automatically aggregate on your MySite. And yes - there are now OOB tag cloud web parts.
Excel 2010 and Excel Services
- No need to name ranges or define parameters if you want to make areas of the worksheet “editable” in an EWA web part. Plus, in an EWA web part, you can change cell values right in the grid. No more of that parameter box over on the right side of the web part.
- Many of the EWA restrictions from the prior version have been removed (spreadsheets with….. embedded images are ok, query tables are ok, macros are ok, VBA code is OK, etc…)
- Sparklines (little micro charts mainly for trend analysis) and Slicers (yet another filtering option with Excel) are pretty cool. The screen cap below hardly does them justice, but displays a little bit of what they’re about.
- You don’t need a pivot table in order to construct a pivot chart. You can just create a pivot chart straight from the data!
Finding What You Want…Search Improvements
drum roll please……YES! There is now a wildcard search baked in! (Was that cheer louder than when the Phillies made it to the World Series??)
- The relevance algorithm is more configurable in the UI. In other words, you now have a lot more than just keywords, best bets, and site promotion/demotion that you can tweak in order to improve (or wreak havoc upon) your search results.
- There are some aspects of semantic search in the FAST product. Microsoft demoed searching from a dashboard page by moving sliders around inside of a chart web part. Different products (along with their details) would surface below the chart, based on where the sliders were placed. The sliders were ostensibly sending different values (price, reorder levels, etc) to the connected data, and then returning query results based on the filtering. Don’t know if that description makes any sense or not, but it was cool when I saw it
People Search:
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- Phonetic name matching and nickname matching for people search. e.g. “jon coughman” finds “Jonathan kaufman” “shartam mikellsen” finds “kjartan mikkelsen”
- Query suggestions mined from search logs
- Self Search – to drive people to participate content. Vanity search and you have richer options to manage how to improve your personal search profile
Ok, so that’s what we’ve uncovered so far from our travels to Las Vegas and the SharePoint Conference. I’ll be pulling some additional information together over the next few weeks so stay tuned for more updates!
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