During his SharePoint 2010 Drilldown keynote, Jeff Teper brought out Jared Spataro to perform what he later jokingly referred to as being the "longest demo on record," but which entailed such a wealth of valuable SharePoint 2010 revelations that I thought it merited a blog entry all its own.
Jared began his demo by showcasing some of the end user enhancements available in 2010, starting by clicking the edit button on a site. Doing so surfaces the contextual ribbon which allows users to quickly and easily customize a site, complete with a live preview of how the edited content will look once published. Noting that team sites are now wiki-based, Jared demonstrated that wiki editing commands are now available while authoring content on a team site. Jared also showed that working with pictures is just as easy as working with text (and photos used in a site are no longer required to live within a picture library), with photo editing capabilities such as resizing an image now available directly in the browser. Jared showed the multi-select functionality which allows for the checking out of multiple documents from a document library at once. Also shown was the newly introduced document sets, which allows a set of documents to be grouped together and moved through, for example, a workflow as a document set. Such document sets can be managed as a set or individually as needed.
Moving on to social media enhancements, Jared described the goal as having been to "harness the power of social computing and put it to work in the enterprise." User profiles include such features as My Network which will surface colleagues' activities, notes, ratings of site content, and more. People search allows users to seek experts within an organization by searching on, for example, product sales*. Results from such a search will surface all individuals whose expertise fits the criteria, including recently authored content by each individual, their tags and notes, an "ask me about" feature, and more. Once you've found the person you're looking for, you can easily leave a note on their noteboard to ask a question or post a comment.
Regarding Business Intelligence (BI), Jared demonstrated that REST feeds of, say, an Excel workbook can now be subscribed to, thus making BI accessible to everyone. Furthermore, the REST-based URL can be inserted into, say, a blog post (using the Insert From an Address feature), thus ensuring that the content of the workbook surfaced within the blog will always represent the most current version ... and all without writing a line of code. Speaking of workbooks, it was demonstrated that over a hundred million rows of data can now be filtered in the browser "in the blink of an eye." That filtered data can then be published to a SharePoint Workspace as desired. Jared noted that PerformancePoint is now folded directly into 2010.
Jared concluded his demo with SharePoint Mobile. Recognizing that not everyone will be using Windows Mobile, a simple login to a SharePoint site via the site URL will surface all site content, optimized for mobile devices, and all of which can be synchronized and/or taken offline as necessary. All of this was demonstrated on Jared's smartphone, and it looked very slick indeed.
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Posted
Oct 19 2009, 06:55 PM
by
John Anderson
Filed under: Demo, SPC09, Keynote, SharePoint Conference 2009, Jared Spataro, BI, End USer Enhancements, Business Intelligence, REST feeds, Social Media, SharePoint Mobile, SPC09 Session
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.