SharePoint Content Management Improvements

The next versions of Microsoft’s SharePoint products for document management, portal hosting, and enterprise search will be released around the same time as the Office 12 suite in late 2006. The next generation will include significant improvements for large-scale document management and extended features for Web content management. In effect, the SharePoint products will become building blocks for end-to-end enterprise content management systems.

(Today, the SharePoint lineup includes Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), a free add-on to Windows Server 2003, and SharePoint Portal Server (SPS), a more comprehensive product sold separately. However, Microsoft has hinted that product packaging and pricing could change significantly in the next release.)

Notable new features include the following:

Content types and policies. Organizations will be able to define specific content types, such as “expense report” or “employee performance review,” and enforce rules for all content of that type. Content types will be the basic mechanism for enforcing compliance with privacy and disclosure regulations through SharePoint sites. Organizations will be able to define required and optional properties of content types (e.g., requiring a “review period” property for employee performance reviews) and set up templates for all documents of a specific content type. They will also be able to set distribution and modification restrictions for a content type (e.g., “only members of the Attorneys group may modify documents of the Attorney Work Product content type”) and define retention and expiration policies for content types (e.g., “all employee performance reviews will be retained for at least five years after the employee’s termination”).