Improved Web Collaboration on Tap for 2010

SharePoint, Microsoft’s broad and wildly popular business platform, is growing from good to great. SharePoint 2010 enables robust business collaboration for the enterprise and the Web by offering a fuller breadth of capabilities and new enterprise-class management tools.

While the improvements made to SharePoint 2007 popularized the product across industry segments with its collaboration and workspace capabilities, portal, and enterprise content management benefits, SharePoint 2010 boasts an even richer, more advanced and integrated feature set that readily enables business collaboration among employees, colleagues, and partners.

The foundational business-collaboration features of SharePoint 2010 include: document collaboration; wikis and blogs; RSS support; discussion boards; project task management; contacts, calendars, and tasks; e-mail storing and management; better design for working with Microsoft Office 2010; and, richer offline support using SharePoint Workspace 2010.

Industry experts say that with SharePoint 2010 Microsoft filled in the gaps of previous versions to offer a dynamic product that will have both existing SharePoint users and new customers clamoring.

“Microsoft definitely made SharePoint 2010 more compelling for current SharePoint customers and new potential customers,” says Guy Creese, research director at Burton Group.

In particular, Creese points to some key improvements in areas such as social software and powerful collaboration tools like wikis and blogs. “For someone who never used wikis and blogs then SharePoint 2007 was fine. But for those used to best-of-breed solutions, the wikis and blogs in SharePoint 2007 were weak,” he says.

SharePoint 2010 changes all that. Microsoft reports that it focused significant attention on transforming the user experience in SharePoint 2010 into a lightweight collaborative authoring experience. For wikis, blogs, and discussion forums, there is a consistent rich text editor that employs the SharePoint Ribbon user interface.

Wikis and blogs work with tools such as Workflows and Workspaces in SharePoint 2010 to encourage collaboration among communities like teams and groups.

Microsoft also added an architectural twist to SharePoint 2010, namely, a scalable services architecture that centralizes services such as Search, Records Management, and Metadata, for example.

“Microsoft got ahead of the game with unified services for all content within SharePoint 2010,” says Creese.

As current SharePoint users know, it’s easy to put up SharePoint sites that provide portal and collaboration capabilities for users. Without centralized management, however, the largely departmental sites that sprouted up across enterprises exist as silos.

SharePoint 2010 eliminates this pain point for organizations with centralized control, in part via the scalable unified infrastructure that’s managed through Central Administration in the product’s streamlined Central Administration Web site.

These new content management capabilities also facilitate the management of content lifecycle from creation to dissemination, whether dealing with documents, Web content, or records – an important need for compliance, e-discovery, auditing, reporting, and retention.

“The built-in records management and metadata enforcement, both centrally and locally, will give SharePoint 2010 users governance capability they can use, a significant update,” says Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst Enterprise software at The 451 Group.

In a nutshell, the enhanced and new features in SharePoint 2010 elevate the product as a true universal and enterprise-class solution.

“Microsoft eliminated the need to work outside the box or rely on third-party solutions with its extra-strength features for governance and search, for example,” says Rob D’Oria, chief technology officer and co-founder of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Innovative ISV award winner BlueThread Technologies Inc.

BlueThread is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) boutique business that focuses on SharePoint as an ECM platform. The ISV expects to see the lions share of its global 2000 business customers migrate from legacy content management systems to SharePoint 2010.

“SharePoint 2010 is a good consolidated platform for these customers to migrate their content management silos,” says D’Oria. Used in conjunction with the ISV’s StoragePoint product, customers with large volumes of content on SharePoint can benefit from economical storage.

According to BlueThread, StoragePoint dramatically reduces SharePoint’s content database size by externalizing content BLOBs to virtually any direct-attached or network-addressable storage device.

Content management is nothing without top-notch search capability and the ability to connect people to information. Considered one of the most significant improvements in SharePoint 2010 is the incorporation of Microsoft FAST Search technology. For customers, FAST Search is a game changer.

“FAST dramatically changes the user experience,” says D’Oria, noting striking improvements in speed across both structured and unstructured data.

With more than 1,000 SharePoint sites throughout the enterprise and eight top-level departmental portals, Del Monte Foods, an early SharePoint adopter, is currently prototyping SharePoint 2010, which is part of its Next Generation Desktop Initiative that consists of a range of Microsoft products for communication and collaboration.

“At Del Monte, SharePoint is a mission-critical application,” says Jonathan Wynn, manager of advanced technology and collaboration services at Del Monte Foods, a $3.6 billion company with 5,400 employees and one of the country’s largest producers, distributors, and marketers of food and pet products.

Today, Del Monte employees use SharePoint 2007 for document management, document workflow, business intelligence, and as a gateway to a plethora of business processes.

“With SharePoint our major business units have a focal point and easy integration with the desktop and day-to-day activities,” says Wynn.

SharePoint 2010 will enable the food industry giant to crank up its already intensive use of the product another notch. Using SharePoint Mobile Access, Del Monte looks forward to extending Office Web Apps, such as Excel and PowerPoint, content to users’ mobile devices.

“Combined with business intelligence capabilities, Del Monte will continue to empower its employees to make key decisions for their business wherever they are,” says Wynn, noting that extending first-class enterprise tools to empower users is a key business objective at Del Monte.

Wynn also recognizes other powerful features of SharePoint 2010, such as scalable services for tagging and search that enhance the information and people findability factor for richer social collaboration and enhanced productivity; and, the ability to build rules and policy for document management and long-term archiving, for example.

Using SharePoint 2010, Del Monte is currently building a prototype financial application using document management and workflow features for the approval of financial information for monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual reporting to Wall St. Current reporting is done manually, is labor-intensive and not green.

“SharePoint 2010 will give us the document management for routing, archiving, safe-keeping and integrity that’s required,” says Wynn.