Features of SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 comes up with a lot of innovative features. These can be mainly classified into six different areas, as listed in the following sections.
Understanding Sites in SharePoint 2010
You can consider SharePoint 2010 Sites as a single platform for all your business websites—intranet, extranet, and Internet sites. SharePoint enables you to create a variety of sites and also simplifies the management of these sites. From a team site for colleagues, to an extranet site for partners, to an Internet site for customers, people can share and publish information using one familiar system. Many features help to build the SharePoint 2010 Sites experience. Some of these worth mentioning are the out of the box web parts, the SharePoint ribbon, multilingual user interface, mobile connectivity, support for Office web apps, cross browser support, and a host of out of the box site templates.
Understanding Communities in SharePoint 2010
As mentioned earlier SharePoint 2010 is a great tool for collaboration. It helps people work together in ways that are most effective for them by providing great collaboration tools that anyone can use to share ideas, find people and expertise, and locate business information. Even better, SharePoint 2010 lets you manage these tools from a single, powerful platform. It enables your people to become more creative and productive through a variety of features such as blogs, wikis, integration with Microsoft Exchange Server and Office Communications Server, Colleague Suggestions and Colleague Network features, tagging features, My Profile, memberships, and much more.
Understanding Content in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 Content further enhances the content management features of SharePoint 2007 and makes Enterprise Content Management (ECM) easy for everyone. It consists of the following features:
• Content Organizer
• Document Sets
• Managed metadata service
• Metadata-driven navigation
• Multistage disposition
• Rich media management
• Shared content types
• Unique document IDs
• Word automation services
Understanding Search in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 provides a rich user experience in terms of search. It provides intranet search, people search, and a platform to build search-driven applications—all on a single, cost-effective infrastructure. But what’s so unique about SharePoint 2010 search is its combination of relevance, refinement, and people. This new approach to search provides an experience that is highly personalized, efficient, and effective. The search features vary from simple site search to enterprise scale search. Search is discussed further in future hours.
Understanding Insights in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 provides highly advanced business intelligence features that let everyone access the business information they need to make good decisions. It includes the following features:
• Business Intelligence Center
• Calculated KPIs
• Chart web parts
• Data Connection Library
• Decomposition tree
• Excel Services
• Excel Services and Power Pivot for SharePoint
• PerformancePoint Services
• Visio Services
The use of well-known applications and interfaces makes people comfortable from the start, and they know how to get the data they need. For example, anyone can use Excel Services to publish Microsoft Excel workbooks in SharePoint 2010. From there, an entire team can access and analyze the same data and rest assured that everyone has the right information.
Understanding Composites in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 Composites helps to build custom solutions on SharePoint that automate processes and connect disparate information. From simple sites to complex applications, you can rapidly respond to specific business needs with custom solutions. The following list, which you can consider as building blocks for custom solutions, helps you appreciate this capability of SharePoint:
• Browser-based customizations
• Business Connectivity Services
• Business Data Connectivity Service
• Client Object Model (OM)
• Developer Dashboard
• Event receivers
• External data column
• External lists
• Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for SharePoint
• REST and ATOM data feeds
• Ribbon and dialog framework
• Sandboxed solutions
• SharePoint Service Architecture
• SharePoint timer jobs
• Silverlight web part
• Solution packages
• Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint developer tools
• Windows 7 support
• Workflow
• Workflow models
• Business Connectivity Services profile page
• Workflow templates
• Access Services
• Business Data Integration with the Office Client
• Business data web parts
• InfoPath Forms Services