By Jill Austin, Director, IM Practice

Microsoft has at last unveiled features of SharePoint 2010 and there are lots of exciting improvements. Some of the highlights (from an information management wish list perspective):

·         The Ribbon is integrated throughout SharePoint.

·         Compliant, accessible (WCAG 2.0) XHTML for browsers including IE, Firefox, Safari and mobile browsers.

·         Social networking includes managed taxonomies and folksonomies, expertise finding, content rating, commenting.  Improved wikis and blogs.

·         Much improved search with FAST integrated. Previews of Office docs in search results.

·         Records management integrated into document libraries. Documents can be locked for changes and have multistage lifecycle.  (Yeah!)

·         Document sets can create collections of documents with shared metadata (Yeah!)

·         Million-plus item lists, and ten-million item libraries.

·         Taxonomy management and ability to drive metadata into documents automatically (e.g., based on folder); automatically route documents into the right library (Yeah!)

·         Service Applications manages content types and taxonomy across sites, collections, web apps, and server farms.

·         Multiuser editing with shared visibility of real time changes in Office documents.

·         KPIs, available in all sites, can be used track project status. (Yeah!)

·         Performance Point Services integrated into SharePoint. Interactions with PivotTables, sparklines and slicers in Excel.

·         SharePoint Online for Internet Sites will host public Web sites

·         Mission critical Access applications and Visio diagrams can be hosted by SharePoint.

·         Sites are now made up of pages in a library, and each can be edited inline. Much improved themes and branding tools for sites.

All pretty exciting for those of us living in SharePoint day and night!  Still hoping for better integration between Outlook and SharePoint – will find out more over the next few months. The public beta will be available in November and we will want to try it out for ourselves and provide more info at that time.