At its SharePoint Conference 2009 today in Las Vegas, Microsoft revealed details about the next version of its SharePoint platform.
"By taming the overflow of information across systems and technologies, SharePoint enables organizations to thrive," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. "SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date. When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business."
SharePoint Server is one of the fastest-growing products in Microsoft’s history, with over $1.3 billion in revenue, representing over a 20 percent growth over the past year. According to IDC, Microsoft attained a significant share of the collaborative content workspace market in 2008, and had the highest growth rate among top vendors with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
During his keynote address, Ballmer talked broadly about SharePoint Server as a business collaboration platform and highlighted three key areas. One was how organizations can respond quickly to business needs with an improved developer platform that makes it easier to build rich content and collaboration applications. Another topic was the enhanced Internet site capabilities that help businesses drive revenue and retain customers on a single platform. The third was the choice and flexibility between on-premises and cloud solutions. At the event, Microsoft showcased the breadth of SharePoint Server 2010 that ranges from wikis to workflows, while Ballmer’s keynote address highlighted features and capabilities such as these:
- A new ribbon user interface that makes end users more productive and customization of SharePoint sites easy
- Deep Office integration through social tagging, backstage integration and document life-cycle management
- Built-in support for rich media such as video, audio and Silverlight, making it easy to build dynamic Web sites
- New Web content management features with built-in accessibility through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, multilingual support and one-click page layout, enabling anyone to access SharePoint Server sites
- New SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, giving developers a premier experience with the tools they know and trust
- Business Connectivity Services, which allow developers to connect capabilities to line-of-business data or Web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client
- Rich APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), to help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint platform
- Enterprise features in SharePoint Online such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, which make it simple to use, share, secure and manage interactive forms across an organization
- The addition of two new SharePoint SKUs for Internet-facing sites, including an on-premises and hosted offer
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, which includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Visio 2010, that are designed to give people the best productivity experience across PCs, phones and browsers.
Availability
The public betas of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Office 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 will become available in November 2009.