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

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