Whats improved and new in SharePoint 2010 Content Management?

SharePoint 2010 has evolved into a mature content management system. The previous version called MOSS 2007 delivered a content management system which was just not that extended in comparison with other content management products in the market. Still Microsoft delivered a useful Portal product what enables customers to setup environment quickly and easy with support for content management.

Today Microsoft is working on finalizing the SharePoint 2010 product which will be released as beta 2 this month. And I have to say that the SharePoint Team at Microsoft has spent some time on improving the user experience with content management.

SharePoint 2010 brings you a solution which enables you and your customers to setup different types of environments which are in need for content management. Think of using it for blogging, internet facing websites, division and company portals, enterprise Wikis but also document and record management centers.

Author and Compose, Brand, Control and Unified platform

There are four main areas which have been focused on. The first one is “Author and Compose” which allows users to create rich web pages with digital media using a familiar user experience. Secondly “Brand”. This area delivered some big problems in previous versions. Microsoft is well known for its generation of non compliance HTML causing a lot of problems when trying to style internet facing websites. With the release of SharePoint 2010 the experience with branding is certainly improved with a set of rich tools and capabilities. The third area is “Control” and gains insight into your website with workflow and reporting capabilities. The fourth and last area is “Unified platform” for team, division, intranet, extranet and internet facing websites.

So what has been improved in SharePoint 2010?

• Standards and Accessibility
  SharePoint 2010 has been improved dramatically. The say that they are fully XHTML complaint and WCAG 2.0 AA Level compliant. Looking at the Alpha and Beta 1 version of the product there are still tables used for non-tabled data like the search box. But it is a major improvement and with Beta 2 it will be complaint. Secondly SharePoint Designer 2010 has been improved and delivers an enhanced tool for power users to change pages based on standards and accessibility.
• Less Clicks
  this is a major improvement. One of the biggest problems in previous versions was switching to application pages as soon as some data needed to be altered. Customers got lost and didn’t know how to get back. The user experience was really bad. With SharePoint 2010 the focus has been placed on as less clicks as possible and if possible to stay in the same context of the page. Meaning that the user experiences the same context when changing items in a list or changing the content of the page. You are only switched to an application page when you click through on a list, or when you go into site settings.
• Data in lists
  if you talk about content in SharePoint 2010 it is most likely stored in a list. Even the static content like publishing fields on pages is stored in columns of a list item. Secondly content of other systems is exposed in SharePoint by using external lists. These external lists enables users to simply view, edit, update or delete content from external sources. The new version of SharePoint supports large lists for storing data, indexing of columns (which can be set by the power user simply through list settings) and simplified views for displaying data. Keep in mind that using large lists in SharePoint is not a best practice. So don’t try to migrate a file-based system one on one into a SharePoint list.
• Full support of workflow
  I’m still not convinced of the out-of-the-box delivered workflow in SharePoint 2010. But with the changes made in Visio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS2010 a broad set of tools is delivered to power users and developers to design, create and develop workflows for SharePoint. Visio 2010 lets power users create workflows which can be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010. SharePoint Designer 2010 lets power users and developers to create even more sophisticated workflows than in the previous version. These workflows can be attached at a single list, multiple lists, Content Types and sites. There is even the possibility for reusable workflows.
• Multilingual support
  the interface of SharePoint 2010 will support multilingual by allowing users to switch languages in runtime. This means that most things like navigation, menus and other out-of-the-box components will change. Custom Web Parts and data from lists will not change.
• Web analytics
  SharePoint 2010 reporting and analytics have been improved in comparison with previous versions. You are able to analyze visitor behavior and even search query behavior. E.g. it is even possible to set an alert on faulty queries.
• Improved Search
  Search has been there from the beginning. A simple version in WSS and advanced / people search in MOSS 2007. This was one of the areas which I was not expecting that much from SharePoint. Mostly due to the fact they bought FAST ESP to deliver an enterprise search product. But in contract to my expectations there have been major improvements to search in SharePoint 2010. Some functionality is excellent OOB relevance, Federated results, metadata based refiners, query suggestions like “Did you mean?” and related searches, view in browser, people search, phonetic & nickname matching, social behavior improvements on relevance, self-search, keyword mining, expertise and profile search and more.

So what is new in SharePoint 2010?

There has been made a lot of changes in SharePoint 2010 in contrast with content management. Some of them are listed below.

• Rich Authoring
  one of the great new features is the way how power users are editing pages in their environment. It is called rich authoring. Rich authoring in SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to change content in a kind of Word-like environment. Changing settings directly reflect the content which is in editing. The environment supports all settings through “Ribbon” style toolbars just like in Office 2007 which enables users to change zones, Web Parts and components in an easy way.
• Digital Media
  As you all may know, digital media was not something pretty in previous SharePoint versions. But with the release of SharePoint 2010 inserting images into your page becomes easy. Normally you had to upload your images and linking them into your page by in most cases copying the URL. Now uploading the image to the right library and displaying it on the page is one action. The settings of images are extended and when in edit mode even real-time sizing of the image is possible by dragging the corners of the image with your mouse. With SharePoint 2010 support for streaming video (without the installation of software) is part of your environment. The video can be streamed from an internet location, file-based location and even directly from one of your libraries.
• Enterprise Wiki support anywhere
  With SharePoint 2010 sites are approached in a different way as previous versions. Each site is seen as a collection of pages. Each page supports Wiki style. What does it mean? When typing two brackets in your page will pop up a search box and list containing available pages and lists to which you can link from your content location.
• Data view mapping
  not all your content is stored in SharePoint. For most companies content is stored in legacy systems, databases, file-based systems and third-party products like SAP and Live Link. SharePoint 2010 offers an improved Business Connectivity services which allows you to expose external data into your SharePoint environment. Secondly the external list is introduced to expose data like standard lists in SharePoint. The power user or developer acts like it is a list in SharePoint while the data does not reside there. It is possible to view, add, update and delete items. This creates a unified editing experience to your users in SharePoint. A big advantage is that not even one single line of code is needed to create an external list on a SQL Server database which proves how easy the usage of Business Connectivity Services and external lists has become.
• Managed metadata
  Metadata is something completely new in SharePoint 2010. In previous versions normally a column was defined which contained the metadata tags. In SharePoint 2010 you are able to create hierarchical metadata structures. These structures can be used cross farms which enable you to create a base set of metadata inside your organization. Different divisions can reuse that set of base data and based on their governance add, change or replace tags. A new type of column is introduced to connect these tags to your content. Selecting tags from that structure is done through tree-like controls. Secondly connecting lists enables the power user to expose other columns next to the connected column. E.g. customer list is connected to a country list by its id. The power user has the ability to select other columns like name of country, number of habitants and other columns which will be shown in the list of customers. These columns are treated like own columns, but the data is part of the other list.
• Social Support
  SharePoint 2010 got some enhancements which contribute to social support. It seems the guys from Microsoft have been looking at other products and took the best of it and implemented it into SharePoint 2010. To my opinion this is a big improvement, but still other tools are more sophisticated. Socializing is mostly visible through the fact that any item, even in document management, has the ability to become rated by visitors. These ratings are used for example in search results. Secondly the My Site environment got some major improvements. Mostly based on copying functionality from existing tools like Facebook.  In previous versions you had the public / private views. Now you are able to create more than those two views. Actions performed by users are visible in some kind of time stream on their My Site page. Other users can follow them and see what they are up to. This could be a rating action, changing a document or just leaving a message on their My Site telling to the crowd what they are currently doing.  It is possible to see where you stand inside your organization and what your relation is to other colleagues. This is presented in some cool Silverlight application.

Hopefully this will give you some idea and understanding over the improvements and new functionality around content management in SharePoint 2010.