SharePoint 2010 - Part 2

Yesterday, I started to describe the features of SharePoint 2010. Today, I will conclude the description of SharePoint 2010.

Enterprise Content Management

Managed Metadata Features

The new Managed Metadata service in SharePoint Server 2010 provides a set of features that enable organizations to manage taxonomies and metadata consistently across your SharePoint sites. With the new Managed Metadata service you can publish and share content types across site collections and Web applications and to use the Term Store to manage terms and taxonomies.

A taxonomy is a hierarchical organization of terms. Users can apply these terms to content on your site if you add the new managed metadata column to lists, libraries, or content types. Taxonomies and terms can be centrally managed within your organization, or you can integrate managed metadata with social tagging and enable users to suggest terms when they tag content.

Document Sets

SharePoint 2010 introduced document sets, which are a new content type that enables creating and managing work products that span multiple documents. Document sets are configured like other content types. They can be set up to include a set of default documents that people then customize when they create a new instance of a document set.

Document set features such as shared metadata, workflows, and versioning enable groups to manage the development of a work product or content set efficiently. A common example of a document set is a "pitch book" used by a team to group different document types together for a product promotion.

Document Center Site Template

The document center site template enables new document management features for a SharePoint site, including the new metadata-based navigation feature. With this feature you can browse content in a large list or library by using metadata rather than by folder location. Unique document IDs make content easy to find regardless of its location.

Records Management

SharePoint 2010 supports the management and discovery of content in place, without the need for a locked down repository for official records. Some of the new records management features include:

• in-place records management that enables you to store records in place next to in-progress content;
• retention policies that now include complex schedules, such as multi-staged schedules and more than seven included record management actions, such as "Send to a records archive" and "Declare" as an "in-place record";
• for larger archives, the Records Center site has been improved by the addition of a hierarchical file plan, submission methods driven by metadata, and the ability to band together multiple site collections that can be managed as one large repository.

Web Content Management

New and improved Web Content Management features make it easier to publish Web pages and manage sites. In addition, SharePoint 2010 now includes support for streaming video.

The Web content authoring experience has been improved and simplified with the addition of the ribbon, which consolidates page commands and makes commands more task-based.

Improvements to export behavior as well as logging and reporting make content deployments easier.

Out-of-the-box Web Analytics features provide support for Traffic, Search, and Inventory analytics reports.

New support for rich media includes a new Asset Library, with rich views and pickers; support for videos as a SharePoint content type, a streaming video infrastructure, and a skinable Silverlight media player.

Large page libraries simplify the management of web sites with many pages.

Creating and managing different versions, or "variations" of publishing sites or pages is an operation that is now submitted to a queue and occurs in the background so users can continue working in SharePoint while the operation completes. A "View Changes" command has been added that allows to compare an older version of a web page with a more recent one. Changes are highlighted in a special report to enable side-by-side editing in the Rich Text Editor.

Search

New Search features in SharePoint 2010 make it easier to locate more relevant information and find colleagues quickly and efficiently. Improvements include a new results layout that refines information into categories, and includes better descriptions and metadata. In addition, people who are in your social circle will appear toward the top of your search results.

New features include:

• refinement: helps to inform you about results and allows you to narrow search results by specific types such as site, author, or date;
• pre-populated query suggestions, related search links, and acronym expansion;
• ability to query for documents by using Boolean syntax (AND, OR, and NOT), and prefix wildcards (*);
• ability to search SharePoint content from a computer running Windows 7;
• improved "Did you mean?" to support more languages and terms within your enterprise.

By using search with the social computing and collaboration features in SharePoint 2010 you can:

• search for a person by expertise to find someone who has the skills that match your needs;
• use the phonetic name lookup to find similar sounding names (is it John or Jon?);
• refine search results by using categories such as department or job title.

The search model uses the properties (or metadata) that you provide on documents. Search now combines the content for key phrases that might locate missing or inaccurate properties, which helps improve the search relevance.

Site searches are automatically scoped to the current site and its subsites rather than all sites.

Business Intelligence

Excel Services

New and enhanced features include:

• improved features for visual data analysis, such as enhanced conditional formatting, sparklines, and intuitive data exploration by using filters;
• tightly integrated client functionality with the PowerPivot for SharePoint, a new "self-service BI" feature from SQL server analysis services;
• the ability to analyze millions of records quickly and easily;
• new formatting and editing capabilities that enable to edit and format spreadsheets directly in the web browser just like in Excel. You can now apply color, style and size formatting to lines, borders, and numbers, and use the same background color features from Excel;
• browser-based creation of new workbooks, and tables in workbooks.

Rich Charts

The new Chart Web Part, based on Dundas data visualization techniques, enables to add rich charts to SharePoint sites by using web-based configuration to connect charts to data from a variety of sources, such as SharePoint lists, external lists, Business Data Services, Excel Services, and other web parts.

PerformancePoint Services

PerformancePoint Services makes it easier to monitor and analyze performance against goals and make better business decisions:

• create and use interactive dashboards with scorecards, reports (including reporting services and Excel services reports), and filters;
• create and use scorecards that bring together data from multiple data sources (including Analysis Services, SQL server, SharePoint lists and Excel Services) to track and monitor your data;
• use analytic reports to identify driving forces and root causes, and apply filters to personalize your reports;
• integrate your business intelligence applications and information with other SharePoint features, such as collaboration and content management;
• dashboards and dashboard items are stored, managed, and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework.

Enhanced scorecards make it easy for you to drill down and quickly access more detailed information. PerformancePoint scorecards also offer more flexible layout options, dynamic hierarchies, and calculated Key Performance Indicator (KPI) features. Using this enhanced functionality, you can now create custom metrics that use multiple data sources. You can also sort, filter, and view variances between actual and target values to help you identify concerns or risks.

Enhanced analytic reports support value filtering, new chart types, and server-based conditional formatting. The unique visualization Decomposition Tree, a new report type available in PerformancePoint Services, enables you to quickly and visually break down higher-level values so you can understand the driving forces behind them.

Site Management and Customization

SharePoint 2010 includes view and adjust permission levels, including item-level permissions, for a particular user or group using the new permissions management tool.

New permissions management is available from every site collection, site, list or list item, so that you can easily add or remove users or groups, change permission levels, break inheritance, and manage anonymous access. In addition, you can view and adjust all permission levels granted to a particular user or group.

SharePoint 2010 includes the new Themes Gallery to select from several themes. You can also generate your own theme files from Microsoft PowerPoint and add them to the gallery for selection.

With the appropriate language packs installed, you can view settings pages, Help, and application content such as list titles and column names in your preferred language.

InfoPath can now be used to fully customize SharePoint’s list forms. You can change the look of the form, switch to multi-column layouts, break the form into sections, validate the information entered, pre-populate fields, and cause sections of the form to show and hide automatically. From any list, click the "Customize Form" command on the ribbon to launch InfoPath. After customizing the form, publish the form back to the SharePoint site to replace the default form.

All standard views of list items in SharePoint 2010 now use the customizable XSLT list view web part. From SharePoint Designer 2010, you can quickly apply custom styles to SharePoint’s list views and conditionally format rows based on their content.

SharePoint Designer 2010 can now be used to fully customize the the Approval, Collect Feedback, and Collect Signature workflows. Workflow capability has been expanded with new actions such as the rich pre-built approval actions.

Reusable workflows can be designed once, and then reused across multiple lists, document libraries, or content types. The SharePoint Designer 2010 user experience has been completely redesigned using the ribbon, creating an experience that’s simpler and more familiar to people who use Microsoft Office.