Thursday, September 15, 2005

Enhancements in SharePoint V3

Next to the first public presenations about Office 12, there was also a lot of exciting news about SharePoint. Most of the focus was on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and a lot less information was given about SharePoint Portal Server V3.0. But the announcements definitely fullfilled the expectations which I formulated in the previous posts (I marked my favorite ones ...):

General improvements
  • WSS introduces a new concept called "Content type" - content types will allow you to define a type of information and associated with it the available metadata, its policy and workflow options. More about it in a next post

  • WSS 3.0 has a recyle bin functionality out of the box. This is actually a 2-level recycle bin - even when a user empties his personal recycle bin, an administrator can still recover the documents

  • WSS 3.0 will support blogs and Wikis

  • SharePoint is RSS enabled - there is basically an RSS feed for every type of list and library

  • Out of the box support for workflow - it will be possible to attach a workflow to any kind of list, to a specific content type or to a specific document in a document library. More about it a next posting

  • Support for document policies - this will include archival and retention management policies, audit trails, etc...

  • Item-level security .... wow, just what we needed

  • A new listtype is introduced, Project Task List, this even includes a Gant chart view which you can use to modify data in the list. It will be possible to use this Gantview also in other listtypes which make use of dates

  • Possibility to add metadata to folders in libraries - you can also use folders in every type of list

  • Possibility to limit the number of versions created for lists with versioning enabled, all lists will be version enabled

  • Improvement of the issue tracking list

  • E-mail integration - it will be possible to send an email to any type of list... when you send an email, it will even store the attachments in a document library and the other recipients in a contact list.

  • Improvement of the calendar view

  • Support for multilanguage - you can use resource files

  • Lots of improvements from a development perspective... I will provide more information about it in a next posting.


  • SharePoint Portal Server vNext
  • SPSvNext introduces an enhanced search - called the Searchcenter

  • A nice feature they demoed in the keynote was "Did you mean?", this will give a suggestion for the searched keyword when you have made a typo or when your searchquery didn't return any results

  • It will possible to integrate your LOB (Line of Business) data within SharePoint Search


  • Office 12 and WSS 3.0
  • Outlook can be used as an offline document repository for SharePoint document libraries - with 2-way synchronisation

  • Access will be positioned as the data integration tool for SharePoint, you will be able to use Access as a frontend to SharePoint datasources

  • Publish from Excel to SharePoint - you can now publish an integral spreadsheet to SharePoint - it will show up with very rich Excel like user interface. This feature provides more options than you currently have with the datasheet view of a SharePoint list

  • Support for distribution lists from Outlook 2003 through integration with AD

  • You can open any list in Access in datasource



  • We can expect a first beta of WSS3.0 near the end of the year, an RTM will probably be available in the second half of 2006

    1 comment:

    Anonymous said...

    Do you know what changes have been made to the Meeting Workspace and its integration with Outlook and Event Calendars?