The new version of Microsoft SharePoint has a lot of new capabilities that make it appealing to businesses and developers. Ed Bott shows four of them that should pique your interest.
Over the years, Microsoft SharePoint has earned a reputation as a top-shelf, top-dollar, top-down working environment for Really Big Corporations. Companies that are big enough to hire small armies of custom developers and pay big bucks to integrators who can spend months putting together a SharePoint site. I’ve used a couple of those sites in the past, and they worked just fine. But I’m glad I wasn’t the one who had to set them up or keep them running.
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I installed a beta copy of SharePoint 2010 last fall on a test server here. Compared to my experiences of three years ago, the experience was vastly improved. I found it remarkably easy to set up. More importantly, I found SharePoint 2010 equally simple to use, right out of the box. There’s still plenty of room for developers and integrators to get involved, but this time around they should be able to spend their time building interesting applications instead of tinkering with plumbing.
Last week I rebuilt a couple of servers using the final SharePoint 2010 code, which was released to manufacturing at the same time as Office 2010. If you have an MSDN or TechNet subscription, you already have access to everything you need; that was my starting point. A lot of SharePoint features don’t make sense until you begin using them, which is why I recommend setting up a small pilot site (use a virtual machine and it’s even easier). That way, you can quickly see whether SharePoint makes sense in your organization.
In this post, I’ll show you four areas worth paying close attention to. READ MORE
