Videos Preview SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 demonstration videos offer a first look at some features planned for the upcoming Web collaboration product. The July 2009 videos suggest that the product will get improvements for backup and monitoring usage, simplified offline access to SharePoint data, and better tools and APIs for customization by developers. Together these could make SharePoint installations easier to manage and more useful for mobile users, and they could help organizations make more of their corporate data accessible via SharePoint sites. However, the videos also flag features that will require preparation by prospective customers, such as a new SharePoint user interface.

Improvements for Administrators, Users, and Developers

The SharePoint line is Microsoft’s platform for user-managed Web sites, and it is primarily employed today for workgroup data and document sharing, corporate portals, and extranets. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), a free add-on for Windows Server, provides a basic set of capabilities for workgroup collaboration; the SharePoint Server product extends WSS with additional components for central administration, content management, enterprise search, Web-based analysis of business data, forms processing, and other tasks. The next versions, WSS 4.0 and SharePoint Server 2010, are currently planned for the first half of 2010.