SharePoint Server Enhances Web Collaboration

The next version of SharePoint Server will deliver social networking and other improvements for sharing information and communicating via SharePoint sites. The improvements will particularly benefit users on intranets and extranets, helping them locate experts and keep in touch with contacts inside their organizations. However, many of the features raise tricky policy and enforcement problems. They will also squeeze partners such as Jive and Newsgator that have offered SharePoint extensions for Web collaboration, and their customers will have to decide whether to migrate to the corresponding new capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010.

(This article covers new SharePoint collaboration features other than Office 2010 document sharing, which is covered in “Document Sharing with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010“.)

SharePoint Products for Web Collaboration

The SharePoint product line enables organizations to design and manage Web sites and enterprise search systems. The next version of the line, due before July 2010, will update two products for building sites on-premises: the free SharePoint Foundation 2010 (known as Windows SharePoint Services, or WSS, in past versions) and SharePoint Server 2010, a commercial product that builds on SharePoint Foundation.