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Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010: What's New and What's Changed?
Abstract
To help companies provide their employees the tools they need, Microsoft has introduced SharePoint 2010, which breaks down into six functional areas: sites, communities, search, content, composites, and insights. These areas come together to reduce operating cost, empower employees, and allow SharePoint the flexibility to change with the changing needs of business. This white paper examines changes and introduces new features to show how SharePoint 2010 can help manage your computing needs.
Sample
Introduction
SharePoint 2010 is the next step for companies that want to provide their employees the tools and information they need to be effective and efficient in the workplace. Microsoft breaks SharePoint 2010 into six functional areas: sites, communities, search, content, composites, and insights. These areas come together to reduce operating cost, empower employees, and allow SharePoint the flexibility to change with the changing needs of business.
Sites provide the foundation for collaboration. Microsoft has made a number of changes to the user interface that have made it easier to work directly on the site and from the site. The new structure provides users an intuitive environment to do their work.
Communities are the social networking aspect of SharePoint. The improvements to SharePoint wikis and blogs address the challenges of how to communicate across a company. User profiles give employees the data needed to build the right team, contact the right person, and build effective corporate social networks.
Search has a wildcard. Enhancements to search allow employees to perform complex queries from SharePoint or the Windows 7 desktop. The queries can now include wildcards, Booleans, and free-text, as well as pre- and post-query suggestions.
Content is managed through an improved enterprise content management (ECM) feature of SharePoint 2010. This makes it easier to control unmanaged data and, with the rich integration the ECM, it provides a more adoptable end-user solution. Automated metadata, tagging, and improved retention provide a more effective solution that saves users a lot of time.
Composites provide a business unit with the platform to rapidly deal with their challenges while complying with the organization's standards. You can develop "no code" collaborative solutions using built-in SharePoint workflows, web parts, and other controls right from the browser. This can be taken further with SharePoint Designer 2010. The integration between Visio, Access, and SharePoint makes it easy for a user to share information with a group, department, company, or the web. Business connective services (BCSs) provide users the ability to work with all their business data resources from a single interface and offline.
Insights are SharePoint's way of getting you the information you need to make better-informed decisions. The new features in SharePoint allow you to quantify the value for your information. SharePoint provides you the ability to access managed and unmanaged data in an integrated environment. With new tools like chart web parts, Performance Point service, Visio service, and Excel services, getting the information to people is simple.
Enhancements for the Administrator
SharePoint 2010 streamlines the efforts of the administrator through the use of integrated power shell commands and enhanced central administration. The improved user interface of central administration makes it easier for the administrator to locate and manage services and resources within SharePoint. The use of power shell allows administrators to develop and execute scripts to manage their SharePoint farm. These scripts can be used to manage permissions to create sites and even install and configure a new SharePoint environment.
Monitoring the performance of your SharePoint environment has been enhanced through new features like the health analyzer. The health analyzer can be configured to automatically fix simple configuration issues within your environment. It will check the status of your environment using rules that you have specified, and make recommendations and explanations on how to adjust the system.
Development projects have been made more manageable through sandbox solution and throttling. As a Share- Point administrator, you can allow areas in your organization to develop and self-manage the use of their own custom development package while maintaining a healthy environment. Sandbox solutions allow .wsp solution packages to be uploaded to the solutions library and activated by a site collection owner. These packages run in an isolated process and can be configured by the administrator to only use a set amount of resources.
Dealing with large lists has been improved in SharePoint 2010. While there may be millions of items in a list, SharePoint does not display every item in a single query of the list. With SharePoint 2010, the administrator can set a rule for the number of items that will be returned to a user and to a site administrator. The administrator can also configure filters to make it easier for the user to retrieve the actual data they are looking for.
