blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

I’m not a gadgety type of person and I don’t get excited about tools for their own sake. But I am excited about the new SharePoint 2010, because it looks like it is really going to make my work more effective, efficient and pleasant. It will allow me to create better information worker solutions for my clients, and of course help me in my own information work.

This assessment is not just based on Microsoft’s sales pitch, but also on some hands-on experience in a sandbox site. At Macaw, we’ve had the beta 1 version at our disposal for a few months, as members of the Partner Evidence Program, but it was still a “secret”. Fortunately, the veil has been lifted at the recent conference in Las Vegas and now we are allowed to talk about it. Unfortunately, we still have only that rather creaky beta 1 to play with, as we must wait until the end of November for the public beta.

I’ve worked for years with SharePoint 2003 and 2007, and these are quite useful, but they have limitations that drive me crazy sometimes. SharePoint 2010 undoubtedly has its own share of quirks and no system is perfect, but it does seem more mature. So what I am talking about here? I won’t try give a full list of what’s new and what’s hot here, but some examples are:

• An interface that is more intuitive and less click-intensive. Web editing directly on the page, where you can enter text, lay it out and add pictures without counterintuitive detours. The Fluent User Interface a.ka. the ribbon offers you buttons for the actions that make sense in the context that you are looking at.
• Tagging that helps you to find information relevant to your subject, as well as people who are experts in or at least interested in that subject.
• Business Connectivity Services that integrate other systems into your working environment in SharePoint: not only can you see data from e.g. SAP but you can also add and edit data in such systems (if you have permission to do so of course)
• Document management features including document sets, which allow you to manage not just single documents but also entire dossiers.
• SharePoint Workspaces, in which you can take the content of your site offline, say, to keep working on a long flight.

This is going to keep me talking for a while…