SharePoint 2010 Silent Features

In continuation to my previous post on SharePoint 2010 sneak preview.

SharePoint 2010 is the business collobaration platform for the web enterprise that enables to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features.

Following are the few silent features from SharePoint 2010 version which I obeserved from the sneak preview. I will be explaining these features and how we can utilize them in our regular job by comparing with the existing version - SharePoint 2007.

Web Edit

This is an excellent feature where the content authors can modify the content inline on the page much quickly and easily when compared to SharePoint 2007. They can also view the preview immediately while changing the fonts or font size...

New User Interface

Now you can find the completely new user interface very much similar to the Office 2007, nothing but the Ribons. It has a contextual interface which makes the user to access the content with very less number of clicks and better performance.

User inteface is integrated with the Asynchronous access. Now its easy for the users to act easily on mutiple items in a single shot. For example when we want to checkout multiple files in a document library, we have to do those many number of time. Now we can do it in a single shot by selecting mutiple files in a document library.

Even you can see the revamped UI for the Central Administration. This makes the administrator to complete their job quickly and easily...

Seamless Image Uploading

In SharePoint 2007, when ever we want to show an image on a page, we will upload the image to a Picture Library and then we will provide the image link on the page. Now we can keep a pull stop for the long way doing this activity... We can seemlessly upload the images while we are editing the content using the Web Edit feature. You can resize the image with in the same browser.

Rich Themes

Apart from the out of the box themes, now you can we import the themes from the office. For example if you want to import the theme from a powerpoint, yes you can import the theme(colors, fonts, etc) to your sharepoint site with same look and feel across all the browsers.

Visio Web Access

In SharePoint 2007 we have a feature of publishing the Excell directly on to a web. Users can access the excell without having any dependency of excell installation on the client machine, which is great feature. Now in SharePoint 2010 Microsoft extended the similar concept to Visio. Using Visio 2010 we can publish the Visio diagrams onto the SharePoint Site and the users can directly access the same using the browser without any installation on the client machine.

BDC -> BCS

Now Business Data Catalog is Business Connectivity Services. Using BCS you can read and write data directly from your Line of Business Data. We can use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio to implement the same.

BCS has connectivity to LOB, Web Services, Databases and display the data in a friendly way enabling users to interact and update it easily on the web, offcourse on office client too.

Silverlight WebPart

Now Silverlight web part is available out of the box.

SharePoint Workspace

Most of the times we want to do the work offline on a list of items and then sync with the sharepoint list. We dont have any other option than going with an Excel. Now with SharePoint Workspace, we can take the sharepoint data offline to work and sync whenever hook to the network.

Usage Reports

There is a central database in the SharePoint Server farm to log usage data and also the health data. This provide us with different varities of usage reports which is not available in current version.

In a summary, SharePoint 2010 has a set of rich fetures for all different categories of users like administrators, IT Professions, Developres and End Users.

Thanks,
-Sri