Think of capabilities as
user-facing functionalities that provide direct business value. By
empowering business users with these capabilities, SharePoint 2010
enables them to do more, faster, and with less effort. These
capabilities also allow users to build their own tailored solutions
using SharePoint 2010 that adhere to the defined business processes
within their organization. These capability areas define SharePoint 2010
as a unique product in the marketplace and allow the expandability and
flexibility needed to empower both customers and independent software
vendor (ISV) partners to create their own unique solutions to
line-of-business problems. Figure 1
shows each of the capability areas provided by SharePoint 2010. The
following sections provide a review of these capabilities. Each area
will be explored in more detail.
1. Sites
SharePoint 2010 includes power collaboration capabilities.
These capabilities are delivered in the form of site templates that are
included with the product. By creating a Team Collaboration Site, small
groups can work together on document deliverables and can track
outstanding tasks, events, contacts, and other supporting list
information.
Collaboration in
SharePoint focuses on empowering users to take ownership of the site and
its content, which will drive user adoption and self-support. A fluent
user interface, with the familiar Microsoft Office Ribbon, delivers a
contextual experience that lets users find the information they deem
most relevant. Integration with the Office client applications improves
productivity by allowing users to open, edit, and save documents to
SharePoint using the applications most familiar to them.
Enhancements in the mobile
experience give users the option of taking their work on the go.
Improved mobile browser support allows users to access SharePoint data
from most devices using the mobile browser interface. Microsoft Office
Web Applications let users view Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and
Microsoft Excel documents on mobile devices. Microsoft Office Mobile
2010 and SharePoint Mobile Workspace 2010 provide Windows Phone users
with a mobile rich client experience, allowing them to work directly on
documents in real time or offline.
With Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010, users can synchronize their local offline enabled workspaces with both SharePoint and Microsoft
Groove. Acting as a completely integrated offline client for SharePoint
2010, SharePoint Workspace gives users increased flexibility as they
take work with them wherever they go. Microsoft Outlook Sync provides
the ability to keep up to date with feeds, lists, and document libraries
on mobile devices, using the familiar Outlook interface.
Finally, Web Parts provide a
flexible way for users to tailor the experience within sites to meet
their needs. By providing a wide array of out-of-the-box Web Parts for
use within their sites, users can organize and present information the
way they want it, based on their needs or the needs of their team. Personalization
lets users tailor certain pages or Web Parts to meet specific needs, at
the same time allowing other users who haven’t personalized the page to
see the shared view arranged by the editor. Alerts can be set on any
item or list in the system to inform users of any changes made.
2. Content
The content
capability within SharePoint 2010 provides many feature areas that are
central to providing the management, publishing, retention, and
disposition of content throughout the enterprise. Web publishing allows
you to make information available to others in a structured way. Approval workflows provide a mechanism for automating the content approval
and publishing process. Content deployment makes it easy to move
content between staging and production of Internet-facing Web sites.
Quick deploy allows for the on-demand deployment of specific content
between sites. Multilingual capabilities provide an intelligent
interface that detects a client user’s language in addition to providing
process automation for the translation of content between languages.
Managed metadata
makes it easy to share common, well-understood field selection and
taxonomical structures throughout your organization and across site
collections. By scoping the metadata services at the site collection
level as well as at the enterprise level, identified valuable structures
can be promoted and can be easily made available across the enterprise.
Furthermore, content type syndication makes the publishing of content
types across multiple site collection possible. A new content type
called hub site collection
acts as a master copy for content types that are pushed down to
subscribing site collections that leverage a common managed metadata
service.
Document
conversion lets users create content in familiar formats, such as
Microsoft Word, and have that content converted into Web page content.
This allows for an array of possible content source formats while
ensuring that a common Web page content output is available for use
within sites.
3. Communities
Communities provide the social networking backbone of SharePoint 2010. Central to the social capabilities
is the concept of My Site, which provides each unique user with a home
within the system. This gives users a place to bring together content
from other sites, update profile information, join networks, and connect
with other users based on interests or expertise. New activity feeds
provide users a way to see what other users in their network are doing.
Profiles let each user describe herself or himself. Profiles are
synchronized with Active Directory, LDAP, or business data systems. When
users have established an identity within the system, social search—or people search as it is commonly called—allows users to find one another quickly and easily.
User presence information allows users to contact one another instantly using Office Communicator through integration with Office
Communication Server. Wikis and blogs provide familiar ways for groups
and individuals alike to publish their thoughts, opinions, and knowledge
in a quick, easy, and informal way. New social features such as
tagging, notes, and ratings create a community context for content
stored within the system. Users can tag content using tags stored within
the managed metadata service, or they can create new tags on the fly.
Notes can be added almost anywhere within the system and are brought
together for a given user within her My Site.
4. Search
It’s great to have all
your information in a common system, but what good is it if you can’t
search for and find the information you need? SharePoint 2010 provides a
comprehensive search capability, which includes a multitude of search
experiences that are tailored to specific usages. From a simple list
level search to a FAST enterprise search experience, SharePoint 2010
integrates the latest search technologies and makes them available in a
unified way.
A robust indexing capability can be configured to search
for content both inside and outside of the system. Bringing all of the
content available within a common index delivers search query results
quickly. Search results include relevance, best bets, and many other
sophisticated search features you have come to expect.
Federation
allows you to search multiple indexes in different physical locations
in a unified fashion. By integrating with the back-end metadata capabilities
within the system, the search feature becomes even more powerful, as
users search for documents and content based on metadata fields and
tags. Alerts keep users up to date on specific search queries as the
results change over time, making it easy for users to keep up with
content as it changes.
5. Composites
Business connectivity services
provide a way for users to work with business data stored in other
systems within SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 expands on the
connectivity capabilities of previous versions, allowing bidirectional
interactions with business data as well as the ability to integrate with
more third-party business systems. Access Services allow users to
render and interact with data stored in Microsoft Access databases, and
Visio Services provide a similar capability for data stored within
Microsoft Visio files. SharePoint Designer provides a rich interface for
creating publishing master pages, page layouts, human workflows, and customized pages.
Human
workflows allow users to create workflows that are based on people
processes and adapt those workflows to an ever-changing process as it
evolves. Forms
Services provide a robust way to render InfoPath forms within the Web
interface, including the ability to leverage custom code and external
data. Finally, Sandboxed Solutions let administrators upload and manage
customization within their site collections. New isolation and
throttling capabilities ensure that user customizations don’t adversely
affect other sites.
6. Insights
Microsoft
PerformancePoint Server is now part of SharePoint 2010, enabling a
whole host of new features for the analysis of business intelligence
(BI) and decision information. Integrated rich analytics allow users to
interact with BI data through client applications and the browser.
Dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and extensive charting
capabilities complete the feature set in a powerful new way. As was the
case in prior versions, Excel Services allows for Web rendering of
Microsoft Excel data within the browser.
Throughout 2009 and into
early 2010, most large enterprises did not view the demand for
SharePoint 2010 very seriously because of the economic conditions
looming over the global workforce. But the engineering workforce at one
organization quickly identified the significant benefits that SharePoint
2010 offered compared to its previous version and lobbied their middle
management, creating a business case for upgrading to SharePoint 2010.
As a result, in the year 2010, SharePoint 2010 gathered enough attention
to be on the CIO’s top five most demanded projects list.
In this large organization,
the demand for upgrading to SharePoint 2010 came from the bottom levels
of the company and worked its way up. The engineers and architects
created a high-value business case not only for upgrading their existing
SharePoint service to SharePoint 2010 but also for deploying a new
service to host business applications across the enterprise. Middle
management offered significant resistance to adopting SharePoint 2010
because they were concerned that being an early adopter of a new product
could pose significant risk to the existing service.
The consulting
architect’s recommendation was to create a quick pilot project for
SharePoint 2010 that would incubate a number of key company-wide
initiatives, not only proving the stability of SharePoint 2010, but also
building organization capabilities around the new product. The pilot
project would also help align central IT with various projects across
the enterprise. This was a real opportunity for the IT department to
jump ahead of business-specific project requirements and demands.
Selecting the right product for a services deployment can make the
difference between anticipating business needs and playing catch-up for
years to come.
A similar demand
arose from the engineering workforce in a financial institution when
they realized that SharePoint 2010 would help them rationalize most of
their business applications on a single platform with potentially less
hardware than their existing SharePoint Server 2007 infrastructure. In
this organization, middle management was agile and provided a bridge
between technical and business groups across the enterprise. The
proactive managers realized they would not be able to justify a new
platform to upper management for an upgrade, however, because the
company was experiencing extreme cost-cutting measures.
They thought creatively, and
instead of focusing on one SharePoint 2010 project, they focused on
creating a cross-organizational collaboration and business intelligence
strategy by including all of their IT and business unit projects. The
strategy was to leverage Microsoft’s SharePoint Online service as the
new platform instead of building everything themselves from scratch. The
strategy demonstrated significant cost savings in terms of time to
market and elasticity offered by the online platform in scaling up and
down as per the demand. By moving to a cloud SharePoint service, they
would automatically benefit from SharePoint 2010 and be able to take
advantage of future upgrade processes. Upper management was sold on the
utility computing concept and quickly responded with funding for
executing the collaboration and business intelligence projects across
the enterprise, independent of the type of platform used. In this
example, middle management executed the project on a short timeline because they were creative and proactive.
Both of these examples
demonstrate the crucial role that middle management plays in driving IT
service capabilities in any organization. Organizational culture plays
an important role in determining how proactive middle management
becomes. Organizational culture can be transformed from reactive to
proactive by identifying key gaps in people, processes, and technology.
In the first example, middle management was risk averse, and as a result
became reactive to the needs of the business. In the second example,
middle management identified and elected to take calculated risks, as
long as the risks were managed. As a result, they were able to move
several initiatives forward proactively.
As an architect, it is your
responsibility to formulate your recommendations based on the best
possible path for your customer. Likewise, it’s equally important that
you are willing to justify your position, even when your recommendations
are not well received. In such cases, you should also try to explain
clearly how your recommendation can transform IT capabilities into
strategic assets rather than cost centers.
