Three weeks and counting since the production launch of SP2010 here at eGroup and we are already reaping some productivity benefits over the MOSS2007 site.  One of the items I have been thoroughly impressed with is the multitude of ways in which SharePoint can interact with your office applications while not locking the user into one specific path.  SharePoint 2010 gives users three main ways to interact with the application…

• The traditional web interface – by traditional we mean greatly enchanced with inline edits of doc libraries and lists without page refreshes using AJAX techniques.
• Outlook Integration – certainly nothing new here but SP2010 Foundation does allow two way communication in the free version of SharePoint (Foundation).
• SharePoint Workspace 2010 – Far and away my favorite.  SharePoint Workspace 2010 ships with Office 2010 Professional and doesn’t disappoint.  Many have said that SharePoint Workspace 2010 is to SharePoint what Outlook is to Exchange.  The ability to manage, communicate and receive alert notifications on changes within the site through a client side application is excellent.  Not to mention offline access to document libraries and SharePoint data and a sleak background sync mechanism to keep it all up to date.  If this doesn’t finally kill Exchange shared folders then nothing will.

There are many features within these three components that make SharePoint 2010 integration with your traditional Office tools much more in depth such as…

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Come join SharePoint users and administrators at the first SharePoint user group meeting for the Charleston SC area.   It will be a great oppurtunity for newcomers and veterans alike to share and learn oppurtunities available in SharePoint.

Here is the official statement…

“We have not set an agenda as of yet.  At each meeting there is ample opportunity to ask questions and get feedback on just about anything.  We spent a good deal of time last meeting talking about learning resources, and also addressing specific problems some of us are dealing with and coming up with solutions or where to get more information.”

 The meeting will be at April 6th at 5:30 PM.  See the link below to register.

http://charlestonspug.eventbrite.com

I ran across a situation and thought I would post some of the time saving management possibilities of feature stapling in SharePoint 2007.  The situation was a typical issue where there needs to be a lot of sites that have the same general features and layouts for default creation when auto provisioning the sites.  In this situation there was a need to automatically provision a SharePoint site for every Account entity that existed in Microsoft CRM.  Therefore, there would be a SharePoint document library, a default number of lists, some custom lists (stapled as features) and a custom homepage that displayed information.  The solution to this is SharePoint Site Definitions (not to be confused with templates).  By using a custom site definition these sites were able to be programatically created and updateable after the point of creation.  The question came in though that certain sites would need additional items and those additional items would be an ever growing number of lists, calendars, custom web parts, etc… that may not apply to all sites in the definition but would apply to more than one.  In comes features… Read more >>

I really like the “new familar” setup to MOSS 2010.  Users whe are familiar with MOSS 2007 will see the typical installer and farm configuration wizard.  Where it changes is when you first log into Central Administration.  Microsoft has made the initial setup more streamlined to get the basic stuff that every install needs set up but also allows you to skip the setup wizard and dive right in.  I like this for two reasons, the first being that there aren’t several pages to navigate to clear out the “farm configuration” alerts that are unnecessary to admins who have configured MOSS before.  The second is that it doesn’t force you to go through the wizard.  Allowing for both types of users to be satisfied.

One of the features I am most excited about diving into is the built in Business Intelligence components.  Now that Performance Point Server 2010  is not a stand alone product but  ”built-in” to MOSS Enterprise.  It should bring a lot of visualization tools to the end user and help bring some great KPIs and Dashboarding tools without needing extra products.

Keep coming back as we dig further into the Business Intelligence features and the configuration side of MOSS 2010.