In the wake of our coverage of last month's SharePoint Conference sessions, this is the third in a series of posts documenting the keynotes and sessions I attended at the Microsoft "Airlift" event for Office 2010. This four-day event took place in Seattle during the first week of June, was open to participants in Microsoft's Technical Adoption Program (TAP), and in essence took the form of a mini-SharePoint Conference.
Tanuj Bansal presented on four of the five pillars of social media enhancements in SharePoint 2010: user-generated content and participation; social feedback; social networking, and people- and expertise-finding. The fifth pillar, identity, had an entire Airlift session devoted to it, so Tanuj limited the focus of his session to the first four pillars.
Tanuj rightly celebrated the fact that in 2010, "blogs look like blogs," and went on to candidly acknowledge that, "in 2007, blogs looked like lists." In point of fact, blogs are still lists in 2010, but they now look like blogs, and boast the Web edit feature found throughout SharePoint 2010, and which includes an Insert button for use with images.
With the feedback that many organizations were using wikis as team sites in 2007, the decision was made to take the next logical step, and the new default template for a team site in 2010 is a wiki.
As was pointed out in a number of the Airlift demos, Tanuj demonstrated that the Ribbon is context-sensitive throughout SharePoint 2010.
Included in the demo was a "mobile emulator," demonstrating the auto-detect feature which will recognize that you're accessing the site through a mobile device, and will serve the content of your SharePoint site appropriately for the detected mobile environment.
One of the key social enhancements is the fact that you can now tag "anything a user can see," e.g., bookmarks, ratings, keywords, and note boards. A couple of notes about tags in this context: tags are synonymous with metadata, and they may be marked as private at their creation. A Tag Explorer feature shows All Tags, My Tags, and Colleagues' Tags (definable).
There is also a note board feature, which introduces the Facebook concept of a user's wall to SharePoint. Notes are posted on a user's Profile page (and can be deleted by the user), and the content of notes may also be surfaced via tags.
Another popular Facebook feature which finds its way to SharePoint with 2010 is status updates, which are also surfaced on user Profile pages. Tanuj explained that since status updates are also easily updatable via mobile devices, they provide an element of built-in micro-blogging in SharePoint.
One final feature mentioned was inbox mining. This opt-in feature, if activated, will automatically suggest content of potential interest to you based on the contents of your inbox, and will serve it up via a feed.
Read our complete coverage of the Office 2010 Airlift sessions:
Posted
Nov 03 2009, 09:30 AM
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.