Michiel's ECM Blog

The first day of the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas offered a lot of interesting stuff on Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint 2010. With SharePoint 2010 a lot of capabilities are introduced that finally make SharePoint a serious alternative for true Enterprise Content Management.

I’ll try to blog about all this exciting new stuff later on, but these are the highlights I especially like:

• With Managed Metadata Services SharePoint 2010 supports content types and taxonomies, not only across sites or site collections but also across server farms. The top-down taxonomy and bottoms-up social tagging (or folksonomy) can be combined to help improve search, navigation and people connections. Also taxonomies can multilingual
• In SharePoint 2010 ‘Document Sets’ offer a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. Finally there’s a powerful out of the box solution to work with dossiers within SharePoint.
• Records management is seriously improved and SharePoint 2010 will be a serious alternative for records management. These new records management features include location-based file plans, multi-stage dispositions, in-place records and e-discovery. Especially the in-place records management is great, because now you can leave the content item in its original context (with discussions, all the metadata en workflow history) etc. So now declaring for example SharePoint blogs or wiki-pages as records is very simple as well.
• There will be an out of the box solution for managing file share content from within SharePoint that enables you to store metadata of a document in SharePoint and using workflow, etc.  while the original document stays on the file share. These capabilities also enables easier migration from file share to SharePoint and off course the coexistence of SharePoint and file shares.
• Each document in SharePoint gets a unique ID that isn’t changed by renaming the document or moving it within the farm.
• Document libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. Combined with out of the box metadata driven navigation users can go quickly to the content they’re looking for.This is key for high-end document and records management.
• There’s also a lot of interesting stuff on enterprise search on which I’ll blog later on.
• To be honest I expected a bit more of the improvements in Web Content Management. Although there are some important improvements, I was hoping for a robust solution for multi channeling, but unfortunately that’s missing. Nevertheless, there’s also some interesting new stuff like the new browser ribbon to speed site customization, content authoring and publishing tasks; improved digital asset management features like thumbnails, metadata and ratings for images as well as video streaming from SharePoint; Improved accessibility; Improved content deployment robustness from authoring to production for larger scale sites.

Some others are blogging from the SharePoint Conference as well, like:

• Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President SharePoint Server at Microsoft – has a great overview of all the new stuff in SharePoint 2010.
• The Microsoft SharePoint Team listed some of the SharePoint 2010 resources that became available.
• John Anderson from Bamboo Solutions has an Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010.
• SharePoint MVP Andrew Connel has three part series on the Web Content Management features of SharePoint 2010:
• Part 1 – Improvements to the Core SharePoint Platform & How the Benefit SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management
• Part 2 – What’s Improved with SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management
• Part 3 – What’s New with SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management