Mark Dunkel from Microsoft came to Washington & Lee University to give some of the CICV (Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia) schools a demo of Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 from a Higher Ed perspective.
The timeline for release is June of 2010 for general availability. SP 2010 will focus much more on hosted solutions, and will feature the ability to mix and match on-line solutions with on-premise solutions. For example hosted Exchange and On-premises Sharepoint. Mark said that Microsoft is really pushing Business Intelligence for the masses as a company wide strategy.
SP 2010 has over 4,000 new features. With emphasis in six key areas:
- Sites
- Communities
- Content
- Search
- Insights
- Composites
Mark showed off several of the new features, including:
- More social, “Like” button and document tagging
- The ribbon will be added to page editing
- More support for Firefox (Firefox is now a “Tier 1” Browser)
- Support for Wiki markup
- Better support for Themes
- Support for Office Web Applications, with support for synchronous editing.
SharePoint Search
- Integration of FAST Search – Enterprise customers are licensed.
- Alerts for when search changes.
- People search with support for Office Communications Server.
- Nice looking org charts with Silverlight.
Other new features
- Streaming video, out of the box. Using Silverlight.
- Content rating (very Netflix-ish).
- Total new calendar – with Calendar overlays.
- Blogs and Wikis.
- Tagging images, with keyword from a central store of keywords
Business Intelligence
- Dashboards with KPI’s (That is Key Performance Indicators, if you don’t speak corporate!)
- Integration with Enterprise Data warehouse solutions
Overall it was a great presentation. It looks like Microsoft has put a lot of work into Sharepoint 2010, and the interface looks cleaner and easier to use just about everywhere. I for one am super excited about the new web versions of Microsoft Office.
