First Look: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Beta

Major upgrade to Microsoft's Web site, intranet, and collaboration platform offers wealth of improvements for end-users, IT professionals, and developers

By Martin Heller
Tue, November 24, 2009

InfoWorld — Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a major upgrade from SharePoint 2007 in several areas. It has a much improved user interface, especially for online editing. It supports more browsers. It does a better job of integrating with Microsoft Office. It provides more opportunities to developers and designers, as well as to shops that might want to consolidate other products (such as blogs and wikis and business applications) with SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010: a Guide to the Many Versions

A Visual Upgrade feature allows gradual conversions of individual subsites from the look of SharePoint 2007 to that of the new SharePoint 2010 at the convenience of the site owners. Sandboxing allows custom code to be deployed with a minimum of risk. Centralized Web administration and rich PowerShell support simplify and speed management tasks. And a centralized "health analyzer" interface provides a farm-wide dashboard.

[ Take InfoWorld's quick visual tours of SharePoint 2010 features: SharePoint 2010: What's new for users | SharePoint 2010: What's new for IT pros | SharePoint 2010: What's new for developers ]

Visual Studio 2010 supports a dozen kinds of SharePoint 2010 projects, can deploy both sandboxed and farm-wide custom projects, and can debug code deployed to SharePoint. SharePoint Designer, essentially a customized version of Expression Web, supports site design at a professional level and even allows nonprogrammers to build simple applications. Interfaces via .Net, REST, XML, and JavaScript allow programmers to tie a SharePoint site to line of business applications and databases, as well as to other applications into SharePoint.

For performance reasons, SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit, and it requires 64-bit Windows Server 2008, as well as 64-bit SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008. (SharePoint 2010 also requires .Net 3.5, which is free.) Microsoft announced these parameters last April, so it shouldn't be a surprise, but some companies may need to factor the cost of new hardware and infrastructure into their budget for upgrading SharePoint.

Pricing for SharePoint 2010 has not yet been released. Assuming that Microsoft prices SharePoint 2010 upgrades reasonably and that the projected server consolidation savings outweigh the up-front cost of new 64-bit servers, SharePoint 2010 should be a must-have upgrade for enterprises that currently depend on SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint 2010 for users SharePoint has long been a versatile platform for all sorts of internal and public Web sites, with an emphasis on group collaboration sites, and SharePoint 2010 has greatly improved and expanded those capabilities. It is more flexible and more capable, has a much improved user interface, and does a better job of implementing multilingual sites. Not every public Web site needs to support dozens of languages, but those that do might seriously consider SharePoint 2010 as an alternative to heavyweight open source Web frameworks such as Drupal.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 next page »

Originally published on www.infoworld.com. Click here to read the original story.

You are here: Technology Topics » Review

Most Recent Technology Topics Stories

White Papers »

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Business Centric DLP

This report, by Jon Oltsik from Enterprise Strategy Group, examines the need for a new business-centric approach to DLP in order to align business and security requirements.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter