The promise of SharePoint "14"
The next release of Sharepoint, Microsoft will be investing for the paradigm shift to more web 2.0 capabilities. The consumer web is influencing the enterprise and search is getting bigger. Microsoft feels that software + services is the best of both worlds – combine SaaS and desktop apps. There are limits of Sharepoint online that can be handled by desktop apps. Social networking and social software are on the rise and success here is about building trust. Social networking is an important first step for collaboration and finding documents. Currently, knowledge is modern organizations isn’t just 80 %undocumented, it is 95% invisible. The Sharepoint social networking capability, Knowledge Network, was not implemented in last version of Sharepoint but they are planning to implement it in next version."
Larry Cannell shares some of the things he has learned about SharePoint "14 from various demonstrations and announcements at the FASTForward 2009 Conference:
Browser-based document thumbnails and previews. I’ve seen a couple of screenshots showing document thumbnails and previews in a SharePoint site. This morning’s presentation showed a set of Powerpoint slide thumbnails within a browser on a SharePoint site.
In a Q&A session at the analyst meeting yesterday, we learned the Business Data Catalog will benefit from the FAST search technologies, although it is not yet clear how. For those of you familiar with the BDC’s ability to aggregate business application data within. SharePoint’s collaborative environment and FAST’s capabilities to work with structured data, this should get you thinking about some interesting possibilities.
Tagging was mentioned in a SharePoint demo during this morning’s session.
Expertise information (perhaps leftovers from the Knowledge Network beta pulled shortly before SharePoint 2007’s launch) also looks to be included in “14.”