Issue 23

SharePoint 2010 Highlights

Our SharePoint gurus name their highlights

We’ve been busy with SharePoint 2010 since well before its official launch date in May this year, and our SharePoint team has been abuzz with the shiny new features of the release ever since they got their hands on it.

But rather than run through the expected facts and figures, we thought we’d go straight to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and ask our SharePoint gurus what they like the best.

Loren Scheuerman

“SharePoint 2010 has come a long way in the area of custom development. Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 are both great tools that are making the development process simpler, quicker and more flexible. Visual web parts, visual designer for features, deployment and packaging functionality and the SharePoint 2010 project templates (to name a few things) that come with
Visual Studio 2010 are helping to increase developer productivity and bring new SharePoint developers up to speed faster than before.”

Jordan Mayer

“I would have to say that one of the major steps forward in SharePoint 2010 has been with custom workflow configuration in SharePoint Designer 2010. In particular, the update to the UI for creating custom workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010.

The new UI makes creation quicker, visually clearer and easier to follow. All steps in the workflow
are laid out on one page, reducing the need to click through multiple windows. With everything on the same page, grouping lines and boxes have also been added to help identify each step and their actions. This is particularly handy with nested steps.”

Philip Plimmer

“My favourite thing about 2010 is the InfoPath integration, especially with Business Connectivity Services. Now you can use the richness of InfoPath forms in SharePoint with almost no additional effort.”

Toby Spendiff

“Excel Services has to be one of the most versatile aspects of SharePoint 2010. Businesses can quickly create dashboards and publish existing spreadsheets over the web. There’s also support for displaying any part of a spreadsheet like a chart or range of cells individually within a web browser. We’ve used this with customers to create dynamic dashboards which pull charts and data from a
number of different spreadsheets onto one page. Very cool!”

Margaret Zou

“SharePoint 2010 Access Services make it easy to publish your Access databases to the web, providing a centralised location for users to interact with your data.”

Angela Knight

“I heart SharePoint 2010 Search! I can set up an external content type, perform a search over the external data, use the standard search with the refiner web part to drill into my results using managed metadata fi elds and then when I select a result, I can open it in a custom results page of my choice passing in any metadata parameter I like – wicked!”

Chakkaradeep Chandran

"Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is packed with excellent new and improved capabilities and benefits that will help your company quickly respond to changing business needs. Productivity starts right from the free edition – SharePoint Foundation 2010. With the new Office Web Applications integrated into
SharePoint 2010, users can now directly edit Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote right from the browser!

One of my favourite features of SharePoint 2010 is the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) which allows you to work with data from other line of business systems as if it lived in SharePoint. And also using SharePoint Workspace 2010, you can now work offline and synchronise your changes back to your SharePoint 2010 site whenever you reconnect."