I have added a new category to the blog for those of us who have an interest in the Microsoft SharePoint space. Anyone who has used MOSS 2007 will no doubt have many dislikes with the current version and waiting with interest of what the 2010 version will bring.

Renamed as SharePoint 2010, the new version has some amazing new features. I have been playing around with the Beta version in a virtual machine and it looks very slick from the first glance. One of the most noticeable changes is the slick AJAX driven UI – no more of those annoying page refreshed when changing one drop-down menu! The Ribbon UI from the new Office Suite has been included to help unite the look and feel across the platform. SharePoint Designer 2010 even takes this new look on board too.

A huge emphasis is placed on the social aspect of collaboration in this release with tag clouds, keyword lists, and user blogs all tying in with a new managed metadata service which is managed from Central Admin.

For end users the new SharePoint Workspace, formerly Groove, is a great tool. It allows users to work on documents offline and then upload the newer versions. Only the deltas of file changes will be updated thus saving users from having to upload full documents.

From a developer perspective, the new version of Visual Studio is just fantastic, offering far richer support for developing on the SharePoint platform. In previous versions, Visual Studio extensions were required to enable developers to program against SharePoint. Now all this functionality is built in, so writing site definitions, building webparts and single click deployment is now a breeze. The new client object model will make writing applications much easier too. It definitely will be a great change for developers going forward.

Some of the other changes that I will certainly find useful is the ability to create re-usable workflows. How many times have we been hindered by the ability to only attach a workflow to one list. Another useful feature is the External content types whereby you can pull in data from external data sources and manipulate it using perhaps XSLT in a webpart.

The list goes on, this is only the first brief entry but hopefully I will post more SharePoint topics in the near future. New search features, REST functionality for Excel Services, WCAG accessibility, LINQ to SharePoint providers – there is so much to write about but that’s all for now.

In the meantime sounds like I need to go off and learn PowerShell.