At the recent Microsoft SharePoint conference, Jeff Teper, Microsoft corporate vice president for the Office Business Platform, met with Sheila Molnar, editor of SharePoint Connections, and described the key themes of SharePoint 2010. Here’s Jeff in his own words:
“We’re continuing to do what we’ve done for four releases, which is to make it easy for people to share, create, find from Office on SharePoint we’re doing four things:
“One is simplifying the save experience from Office to SharePoint. That new sync protocol saves changes in the Office document asynchronously. So if the server is running remotely or the cloud the Office experience saving will be faster and more responsive.
“Thing two is rather than have a complicated set of dialog boxes, we have the context behind the documents, something called the ‘Backstage,’ in Office 2010 and that’s where all the collaboration tools start workflow, share securely, add metadata. Make it easy for users to find those things.
“The third is we’re introducing a new offline client for SharePoint. We redesigned and renamed Groove. We’re calling it the SharePoint Workspace and we let you take your SharePoint lists and libraries offline, make changes, and sync them up to the server.
“And the fourth area that you’ve probably heard about is that we have web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that give you full fidelity, complete round tripping, basic editing, within the browser. Microsoft browers, Firefox, etc. Safari and so forth. And that will let you have people collaborate on the SharePoint site whether they’re a PC in Office or anther operating system with a browser. Imagine two scientists collaborating on a research notebook in One Note on a SharePoint server. One can be working on those research notes in the lab offline with one note. The other could be accessing it from a Linux PC running Firefox, editing it from within the browser. So the themes are the same as the last few releases making it easier to create and collaborate within Office and these are the big new features.”