LABS GALLERY: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta Shows Platform Joining Modern Web Age

by Jim Rapoza

Like most other new Microsoft applications, SharePoint 2010 has adopted the Office ribbon interface throughout much of its user interface.

The personal user pages in SharePoint 2010 have been updated to reflect modern aspects of social networking, such as Twitter-like status updates and Facebook-style connections and social tagging.

In the beta of SharePoint 2010, the Microsoft platform is now a much more agnostic player when it comes to Web browsers, offering much the same experience for Firefox users as for IE users.

SharePoint 2010 includes Web-based versions of popular Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can view and edit Office documents on a SharePoint server while on a system that doesn’t have those Office applications installed.

Creating and setting up different content types for a SharePoint site is now much easier and richer in SharePoint 2010.

The Microsoft SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove) provides a rich desktop client for using SharePoint 2010. The Workspace also makes it possible to work on SharePoint content while offline.

The SharePoint Designer is an Office 2010 application that provides developers with a rich environment for creating and editing content for a SharePoint 2010 deployment.

Built-in analytics capabilities in SharePoint 2010 help administrators and site managers track the use of their SharePoint sites and resources.

The Central Administration interface in SharePoint 2010 has been updated to help administrators manage the core settings of their SharePoint platforms.

The SharePoint 2010 beta monitors its own health and provides warnings and potential solutions to the problems that it finds.

Logging events in SharePoint 2010 now can be done to a much more fine-grained level than in previous versions of SharePoint.

The new Service Applications model in SharePoint 2010 offers greater control when it comes to setting up and extending a SharePoint installation.

New configuration wizards can step administrators through the process of setting up different aspects of their SharePoint 2010 server.

With much of the interface in SharePoint 2010 seeing major changes, upgrades could cause problems. The new Visual Upgrade makes it possible to keep old SharePoint interfaces in place and slowly turn on the new interface after the initial upgrade.