Laura Brown, Product Manager for SharePoint, was the speaker for the SharePoint Sites: What's New & Improved session this morning at the SPC, and after just a couple of slides, she cut to the chase and dived straight into her demo. A high level overview, Laura's tour of sites included examples of an intranet site, a Profile site (analogous with 2007's My Site), an Internet site, a team site, and touched on a number of related features.
Beginning with an example of an intranet home page in 2010, Laura spotlighted the new out-of-the-box Chart Web Part, as well as the tag cloud which might be found on such a page. Laura demonstrated the extended power of the tag cloud by showing how clicking on a tag will surface the Tag Profile page featuring options previously detailed in my blog of Christian Finn's session on Social Computing in 2010. Laura discussed the audience targeting feature that will enable content that's directly relevant to specific users to be surfaced on a public site based on memberships and groups to which a given user (or group of users) belongs.
Demonstrating the ease of creating a new team site in 2010, Laura noted that the new graphical interface makes the creation of team sites significantly more fluid than the 2007 process. Included in the demo were the Web Edit and real-time edit preview that's available throughout sites in 2010. During the creation of the site, she also showed the Site Settings page, changing the site's theme and mentioning the ability to import themes from PowerPoint which can then be applied to a SharePoint site. While on the Site Settings page, Laura also pointed out that the mobile URL for the site in question is prominently displayed.
After creating a new list item, intended as a news release, Laura showed that by clicking a publish option associated with the item, a workflow can be automatically kicked off, sending the item for pre-publication approval. Switching users, Laura logged in as an administrator, and demonstrated the audience targeting feature, as the administrator's My Tasks showed the need to approve the publication of the news release. After doing so, Laura brought up the Internet home page where the article had just been published. Then, while still logged in as an administrator, she showed that the full Ribbon UI and contextual editing options are also available on an Internet site for users with appropriate permissions, such as the administrator in question.
Laura also demonstrated the many features associated with the new Profile page, and here again, I will refer interested readers to the in-depth report on those same features from the aforementioned Social session.
At the end of the demo, and in the Q&A which followed, Laura discussed a number of available features and fielded related questions for areas that had not been demonstrated. One of the most powerful of these is the multilingual UI that's installed on the server with 2010, and is configurable by individual users to display content within the SharePoint site in that user's chosen language.
Additional items of note which were discussed include the following:
- XHTML 1.0 and WCAG are supported out-of-the-box
- The Fantastic 40 templates will be fully upgradable to SharePoint 2010
- Tag clouds are configurable and can be configured to surface tags from within a specific site, across all sites, or even limited to displaying just a user's own tags
- SharePoint Workspace doesn't currently have the ability to take wiki content offline, and the engineering team is actively working towards a solution
Catch up on all of our SPC '09 sessions coverage:
Posted
Oct 20 2009, 05:06 PM
by
John Anderson
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.