Kraft Kennedy | Technology Blog » SharePoint

Simultaneous Editing in Office 2010 Web Apps: Only in Excel

Michael Fettner — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:59:26 +0000

Simultaneous editing for collaboration is one of the most hyped features in Office 2010, however it’s only supported over the web in the Excel 2010 web app. For Word and PowerPoint simultaneous editing, you’ll need to have the full client versions of the Office 2010 products. This will likely be a disappointment for people who were hoping to collaborate on documents from kiosks anywhere in the world.

Below are some screen shots of what you’ll see if you try to simultaneously edit a document in SharePoint 2010:

Word

Word will only let multiple people edit a document at the same time if you’re using the full client. In the Word 2010 web app, the second person will get this error:

PowerPoint

PowerPoint will only let multiple people edit a presentation at the same time if you’re using the full client. In the PowerPoint 2010 web app, the second person will get this error:

Excel

The Excel 2010 web app is the most advanced web application and allows multiple users to edit a spreadsheet at the same time. Other users will see changes as they are made by someone. If two users try to edit a cell at the same time, then the second edit will be the one that saves.

The Excel web app is shown in the screen shot below.

In the bottom-right, the web app tells you how many users are currently editing the spreadsheet.

Surprisingly, the Excel desktop client cannot participate in simultaneous editing. This collaboration feature is only available from the web app.

OneNote

The OneNote web app does allow simultaneous editing, however edits should be limited to separate pages. As long as users are working on separate pages, they will see updates that someone else made when clicking on the page. When we tried to edit the same page between several users however, we were presented with “conflicting changes” errors as shown below, with the only option being to delete the page.

The simultaneous editing features in Office 2010 open up a lot of possibilities for collaboration, however it’s disappointing that only Excel can fully utilize it in the web application. Our hope is that the next version of Office will fully support multi editing in both the web apps and the client versions.

SharePoint Redirection Options in Upload and New Item Forms

Michael Fettner — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:57:34 +0000

When you click “New Item” in any SharePoint list or “Upload” in any document library, SharePoint sends you to a standard form for creating the new item. Behind the scenes, SharePoint also passes in two parameters to let the form know where to post the item and where to go after the item is posted. By leveraging these two parameters in the URL, you can make a link anywhere that posts data to any list and sends you someplace else when finished. This has come in handy for us when creating intranet home pages, as we can create a list of links to post data to custom lists, which sends the person back to the home page afterwards. Otherwise, the person would end up in the root of the list or library they submitted the item to. So we were able to easily meet a requirement that the person be directed back to the home page after submitting the item.

A SharePoint new item link is structured as follows:

https://intranet.doman.com/site/Lists/listname/NewForm.aspx?RootFolder=/site/Lists/listname&Source=https://intranet.domain.com

The two parameters of interest are RootFolder and Source. RootFolder tells SharePoint where to post the document. If it is removed from the URL then SharePoint will post data to the root of the list where newform.aspx is located. You could also specify the path to a subfolder there, and SharePoint would post to that subfolder. Source tells SharePoint where to go when the posting is complete. The source needs to be a place in the site collection. In the example link above it is back to the home page. If source is left out of the URL then SharePoint will just return you back to the root of the list afterwards.

By using these two parameters, you can create lists of links on a page rather than having to drop in web parts, and you will gain more flexibility in how the user experience and navigation work.

Useful Free Web Parts for SharePoint – Part 2

Michael Fettner — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:25:22 +0000

In a previous post, I discussed some useful free web parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. In this article I’ll discuss two more very helpful solutions for building extranets in SharePoint and for building more advanced workflows in SharePoint Designer.

CKS Forms Based Authentication Solution

http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=17901

This is a free open-source solution which handles much of the complexity of building extranets in SharePoint. It has web parts for creating new SQL user accounts, for extranet users to manage their password, and for access requests and approvals. You used to have to use third-party software or a Visual Studio project for even just creating users in a SQL database. With this solution installed, all forms-based user management is done right through the SharePoint settings interface. The only thing you still have to do by hand is provision the database, and modify the web application web.config files to add a SQL authentication provider. This solution has been extremely helpful for us in building a few client extranets.

Useful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow Activities

http://spdactivities.codeplex.com/

This solution adds a bunch of activities to SharePoint Designer’s Workflow Designer. The activities are listed below. This has allowed us to easily create several workflows in SharePoint Designer without writing any code. In particular, we’ve been able to get around the problem where SharePoint form libraries show all submitted items to contributors by default. This is an issue when users are submitting forms with sensitive data, which should only be viewable by administrators. Rather than resorting to a code solution, you can create a workflow that simply “Grants Permission on Item” to the creator, and “Deletes List Item Permission Assignment” for the contributor group. Presumably the admin group would already have full access.

Send Email with HTTP File attachment – Allows sending emails with attachments retrieved using a web request
Send Email with List Item attachments – Allows sending list item attachments as files attached to an email
Start Another Workflow- Starts another workflow associated with a list item
Grant Permission on Item- Allows granting of specified permission level on a specified item
Delete List Item Permission Assigment- Allows deleting of specified permission level assignment for a given user
Reset List Permissions Inheritance – removes any unique permissions assigned to an item by inheriting list permissions
Is User a member of a SharePoint group- Checks if a given user is part of given SharePoint group
Is Role assigned to User – Checks if a user role is already assigned on the current list item
Lookup user info- allows to lookup properties in site’s user information list for a given login
Copy List Item Extended Activity – Allows copying/moving list items and files cross site.
Send Email Extended- Enhaced version of the OOTB activity. Allows you to specify the sender. Also does not break links in body.
Get InfoPath field inner text
Get InfoPath field inner xml
Set InfoPath field inner text
Set InfoPath field inner xml

Importing Employee Photos into MOSS 2007 MySites

Michael Fettner — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:36:10 +0000

Most of the information in an employee’s MySite profile comes from the Active Directory profile import, which is set up in the SharePoint Shared Service Provider. However, this can be tricky with employee photos since links to photos are not normally stored in Active Directory. An easy way around this if you don’t want to store the links in Active Directory, is to simply create a picture library in SharePoint and upload all of the employee photos to the picture library with a standard name, such as username.jpg. Then you can write a script to update each MySite profile and associate the photo with the person.

The code below is VB.Net code to interact with the SharePoint profile database by using the userprofilemanager class. This will update one profile, so it would need to be put in a loop to update all of the employee profiles.

'Objects for profile database

dim strUrl as string =

dim site as Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite = new SPSite(strUrl)

dim sc as Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext = Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext.GetContext(site)

dim upm as UserProfileManager = new UserProfileManager(sc)
dim sAccount as string = "domain\username"
Dim u As UserProfile = upm.GetUserProfile(sAccount)        
if u.ProfileManager.Properties.GetPropertyByName("PictureURL") is nothing then
 'error code
else
 u("PictureURL").Value = '
 u.Commit
end if
Remember to also include the following assembly and namespace...
<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles" %>
If you import additional fields into the profile store, it may be necessary to also run a complete profile import and an incremental search index process to make sure that everything is up to date.  Future profile imports won't overwrite the PictureURL property, so all employee photos should be permanent.  The only drawback is that you will have to run the script for new users or manually enter their picture URL.

SharePoint 2010 Beta Installation Tips

Michael Fettner — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:22:59 +0000

The SharePoint 2010 Beta has finally been released, and this article will just give a few tips to make the installation smoother if you decide to install. The first step is to choose which version to install. It’s being released as two versions–An Internet facing version, for organizations that will use it to create public web sites and extranet sites, and an Intranet version, for internal corporate intranets. Both versions will support and incorporate all of the features available in SharePoint 2010.

The Internet facing version can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=77195785-0282-4ACC-B6F4-7569E1011581&displaylang=en

The Intranet version can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=77C30C6C-47FC-416D-88E7-8122534B3F37&displaylang=en

These are the hardware requirments, according to Microsoft:

The requirements below apply to single server with built-in database installations and server farm installations that include a single server or multiple servers in the farm.
For other configurations, click here for details regarding your configuration scenario.
Processor: 64-bit, dual processor, 3 GHz
RAM:

Hard Disk: 80 GB.

In terms of software, the machine must be running a 64 bit version of Windows 2008.

Additionally, you’ll need to install the following before installing SharePoint:

Install SP2 for Windows 2008. The SharePoint pre-req analyzer is not reliable with this service pack, so you should download and install SP2 separately before attempting to install SharePoint.
If you plan on doing a complete install on a single box, first download and install SQL 2008 Express SP1 (x64). You should always choose a Complete install rather than a single server install, however the complete install requires that you install and connect to SQL separately.
Uninstall PowerShell 1.0 if it is installed.
Install KB971831 (an update for Windows), using one of these links :
- For Windows Server 2008 with SP2, see FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=160770).
- For Windows Server 2008 R2, see FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=166231).

Searching iManage and OpenText from SharePoint

Michael Fettner — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:50:24 +0000

Autonomy iManage and OpenText eDocs both have protocol handlers for SharePoint, which enable the SharePoint Enterprise Search engine to index documents stored in the DMS, while keeping the documents in the DMS. Many people haven’t been aware of this and thought you had to migrate all of the documents into SharePoint to search them, or to use an enterprise search engine provided by the DMS vendor. However, these protocol handlers can provide the best of both worlds by allowing you to continue managing documents in the current DMS, while taking advantage of Microsoft’s FAST enterprise search indexer to index the DMS content, SharePoint content, file shares, web sites, Exchange public folders, and other enterprise systems. Security trimming is preserved by the protocol handler, so users will never see documents in the DMS that they don’t have access to. The protocol handlers both support Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

More information on the OpenText eDocs SharePoint integration and protocol handler can be found here:

http://www.opentext.com/download/livelinkdownload.html?path=product/microsoft/ot-clmsp-edocs-po.pdf

More information on the iManage SharePoint protocol handler can be found in their partner portal, by filtering the list of products to “SharePointProtocol Handler.” Note that you need a partner login account to download the documentation and release notes.

http://worksitesupport.interwoven.com/WorkSite/scripts/portal.aspx

Both vendors also offer a comprehensive set of web parts to drop into a SharePoint environment to view and manage their documents from within a SharePoint site.

SharePoint Conference 2009 Takeaways (on SharePoint 2010)

Michael Fettner — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:50:36 +0000

I recently had the good fortune to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, which outlined the new features in SharePoint 2010. Below are some of the things I took away. I think this will be a huge improvement over the current version, and will offer a lot of very compelling new features, and a lot of good reasons to make the upgrade.

General Comments

The Beta will be released in November. Final product will be released in the first half of 2010.

Microsoft is focusing on making the upgrade and updates easier. You can upgrade the back end, while still keeping the master pages (look and feel of sites) the same. Then you can upgrade the master page at the site level to test and get all of the new features.

Everything is 64 bit. It requires SQL 2005 / 2008 64-bit, and Windows 2008 64-bit. The server must have at least 4 GB of RAM.

A level 1 browser is required for users (IE 7 or 8, or FireFox 3) plus SilverLight for the best experience.

WSS is now called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, and is still free. SharePoint Designer is still free. SharePoint Server still has Standard and Enterprise CALs.

There’s a limitation on data storage now if you don’t have SQL… The basic install uses SQL Express now (rather than Windows Internal Database in the old version), which has a 4 GB data limit. So we should keep this in mind for small projects, and typically recommend SQL Server.

SharePoint has emerged as an entire platform, and Microsoft believes this will bring ECM to the masses, BI to the masses, etc. Microsoft is also positioning this as a full featured internet-facing platform, as well as an intranet / extranet portal which 2007 was though of.

SharePoint should be evaluated along with Office 2010, since the integration is now extremely tight. SharePoint can be the access point for all of the firm information.

The most impressive things I saw in 2010 were the workflow enhancements in 2010 and the Office web applications. In many instances I couldn’t tell whether they were demoing things in the rich Office client or in the Office web app—the user experience is almost identical in either case!

Interface

The interface features a contextual ribbon, similar to all of the Office products, except web based. It allows for running an action on multiple documents, since you can select multiple documents and then perform an action in the ribbon. The interface is AJAX and SilverLight based, so there’s no postbacks and everything is more fluid and visually appealing.

Rich services are now included for Access, PowerPoint, and Visio, in addition to the existing Excel Services. Office web apps can be hosted in SharePoint, and people can co-edit files, such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. The Project Server 2010 web editor was very impressive, and looks just like the Project Professional client.

Wiki editing is much improved, with drop down links to choose from when you start to make a wiki link, and easier photo uploading.

You can set up multi-authentication from the same URL now, which is useful for extranets. The user would hit the URL and get a prompt for which type of authentication to use, such as FBA or Windows Authentication.

SharePoint includes a native SilverLight web part, so you can drop rich content into any page. For example, you can drop in the SilverLight mapping web part wherever you need dynamic maps.

ECM

Each document is given a unique document ID.

Outlook integration is unchanged. Microsoft is pushing SharePoint WorkSpace for offline access and as the desktop client, but if you want to work from within Outlook (or for email filing) you still need a third-party product.

Document sets are introduced, which let you run actions on multiple documents.

Document libraries now have a “Connect to Office” button, which puts a link to that document library in the Word File -> New menu. Office integration is tighter.

Documents can be worked on in the web app in SharePoint and edited at the same time.

Microsoft has developed SharePoint to meet all eDiscovery guidelines. In Site Actions, there’s a Legal Holds and eDiscovery option. You can enter search terms and find all discovery hits. You can then “Add Hold” and lock down all corresponding content. You can then view a Hold Report, and see an Excel web access report of all items with a legal hold applied.

Records Management has been improved. In the ribbon, you can declare a file as a record. Records can be declared in place wherever they are, so you don’t need to use a records center anymore. You can automate workflows around records in place. You can also define information management and retention policies to each level of documents, and can define multiple levels of retention (i.e. after x amount of time, move here, then delete after another period of time.) You can set up organizer rules based on metadata and content types for where to move the documents.

In SharePoint Designer, you can create workflows that move, copy, or stub and link documents to a record center.

Workflow history is now shown as a visual diagram.

Videos can be uploaded to SharePoint and then streamed over a web page.

Document libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. There’s also an out of the box option for managing data on file shares by storing metadata in SharePoint.

Social Computing

There are many more social features included and MySite now resembles more of a FaceBook type page. MySite includes your status, your information, business relationships, and posts from people you are following.

All content can now be tagged, and allows you to write notes and rate any piece of content on a 5 star rating. SharePoint also includes a tag cloud.

Business Intelligence

Project Gemini is now broken into SQL PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint PowerPivot. By installing the addin to Excel, and defining relationships between data sets, Excel can use the analysis services engine to run complex calculations in memory and manipulate millions of cells in seconds.

You can share data between PowerPivot files. The queries use MDX (same as analysis services), so they’re not just Excel documents anymore, they’re entire OLAP BI solutions.

PerformancePoint Services 2010 are included with the Enterprise CAL. It allows you to drill down many levels deep into data analysis. Graphics are updated with SilverLight and you can do some cool things with 3D floating windows and animated time-lapse charts.

You can use SQL Reporting Services web parts along side Excel web access parts for reporting. Reporting Services is the engine for the new Access Services reporting.

There’s native support for reporting on SharePoint lists.

Reporting Services Configuration has been made easier.

Reporting Services uses an AJAX viewer, so no page refreshes, and there’s a full drill through of reports.

There’s support for alternate access mappings, so you can target reports to a zone, such as an internet zone.

Workflow

SP Designer workflow is no longer tied to a list. It can be created as a site / site collection / content type workflow.

SP Designer workflows can be imported into Visual Studio now.

Approval, Collect Feedback, and Signature workflows are still built in. You can specify rich forms in InfoPath and can now specify due dates and other simple behavior in tasks.

In Site Actions, you can directly open a site into SharePoint Designer.

Association Columns can be defined for a workflow, to create necessary columns in a list if they are not present.

Impersonation Steps can be defined in SharePoint Designer, where you can impersonate the security context of the workflow designer, rather that the person that kicked off the workflow. This is HUGE. We had to do crazy workarounds because of this security context limitation in 2007.

SharePoint workflows can be exported to a template in Visio, and vice versa!! You can create a flow in Visio and then import it into SharePoint Workflow Designer.

You can now do a hierarchy of task assignments, instead of just one after the next.

You can specify task outcomes like yes / no / maybe.

You can specify a process of approvals, such as having it be unanimous from several people, or just one person of several can approve.

Search

SharePoint comes with a basic SharePoint Search which is ok. This can be upgrade to FAST Search for SharePoint, which adds a lot more features. There’s also FAST Search for Internet Business.

Many search-based commercial sites are powered by FAST Search, such as Financial Times, Globrox.com, oodle.com, etc.

FAST lets you index all the information, find patterns in the data, and create refining criteria. FAST search automatically creates the refining criteria for your search, and lets the user further refine based on those relevant categories.

Search can be federated.

Search is more scalable; 10x as many docs searchable.

Partners can enroll in the FAST Partner Program, enroll in the Search Specialization Program, and get training resources at FAST.

Administration

Stsadm has basically been replaced with PowerShell. PowerShell is not SharePoint specific, so in many cases it takes multiple commands to accomplish the same thing, but you have a lot more flexibility. SP 2010 will ship with 500 + PowerShell scripts.

Sandbox Solutions can be deployed, like wsp projects, but it allows the administrator to lock down exactly how much of the API and access levels that will be available to the application. So there’s more control over what custom applications can do and interact with.

Visual Studio 2010 has native templates for creating and debugging SharePoint web parts, workflows, and other solutions. Additionally, there are new APIs available for developers, and developers can create SilverLight web parts to drop into and interact with SharePoint content.

Useful Free Web Parts for SharePoint

Michael Fettner — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:52:12 +0000

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) doesn’t come with a whole lot of web parts out of the box, but here’s a few handy ones we’ve found to spice up some of the home pages we’ve built. These are all free and work with WSS.

Tim Heuer’s RSS Feed Reader
http://feedreader.codeplex.com/

Only MOSS comes with an RSS reader, and even that one can display only one feed. This web part is invaluable if you’re using WSS. This is the best free RSS feed web part that I’ve found, and it allows you to neatly pull multiple feeds next to each other.

Bamboo World Clock and Weather
http://store.bamboosolutions.com/pc-55-1-world-clock-and-weather-web-part.aspx

This web part neatly displays the weather in 3 cities side-by-side and can optionally display the time if they are in different time zones. This is a nice looking web part and tends to fit nicely on the right-hand side of a home page for a firm with multiple offices.

Amrein MSN Money Stock Quote
http://www.amrein.com/apps/page.asp?Q=5731

This web part displays stock quotes, company names, changes, and percent changes pulled from MSN Money. It’s the best free web part I’ve seen to do this, and will save a lot of time over trying to follow one of the examples online for doing this with a data view.

Matt Jimison’s Twitter Search Web Part
http://www.mattjimison.com/blog/2009/03/04/twitter-search-webpart/

This uses the twitter search API to search twitter based on the parameters you specify in the web part, and you can download the wsp or the source code from the web page.

Kraft & Kennedy Google Search Box
(Code below)

We’ve had a few instances where we were asked to put a Google search box on a SharePoint page. This can easily be accomplished by just inserting a content editor web part on the page and editing the HTML directly. You can paste in the following code, which includes JavaScript, to open a Google results page after the person enters a search term and presses enter or clicks a button. This is of course a simple approach–you could also federate search results in your search center to include Google–but this simple html code works well in many cases.

Search Google:

Using SharePoint as a DMS for a Law Firm

Michael Fettner — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:03:13 +0000

Whether or not SharePoint can be a viable DMS at a law firm has been a big point of contention in the legal community. A lot of this comes down to the mentality and size of the firm, and the specific requirements that the firm has for document management. With proper planning and one or two simple addins, SharePoint may be a viable DMS for certain firms that are flexible and willing to invest in a development effort.

The advantages of using SharePoint as a DMS are many:

Being able to wrap an intranet or extranet around all of your content.
Having basic matter management features available in every workspace, such as a shared calendar, task lists, and discussion threads.
Having access to document workflows.
Being able to search all of your repositories with Enterprise Search (available free with Microsoft Search Server Express.)
Being able to integrate business intelligence dashboards.
Providing access to web 2.0 features such as wikis, blogs, and personal sites.
Leveraging native Word features, and not having to rely on vendors to update their software to support the latest version of Office.

The main way to ensure a successful SharePoint deployment as a DMS is with proper planning. SharePoint can all too easily be deployed out of the box, with no oversight in place. While this may work out ok for an intranet, it spells disaster for a DMS. Thought should go initially into defining what content types are needed for the firm. Content types are similar to document types in a DMS, and allow for the classification of documents by defining metadata, retention rules, associated workflows, and starter templates. After defining content types, you would need to create a taxonomy, or hierarchy for all of your clients and matters. One structure that works in WSS is to create a team site for each client, and then a document library for each matter. We’ve successfully written scripts to create client and matter workspaces based on this approach, and to import documents from the file system into SharePoint. When a user saves their own document into SharePoint, they would drill down the client site to the matter library, and then simply have to choose a content type associated with the document.

The thing that seems to scare people the most is something architectural rather than functional—the fact that SharePoint stores files in SQL blobs, rather than in the file system. This causes fears that corrupt files will not be able to be recovered, or that disk costs will get expensive or lead to unmanageable databases. However, we should remember that there are plenty of excellent third-party solutions for doing backups and restores of SharePoint at the individual file level, as well as native backups and restores in SharePoint. Microsoft Exchange stores all of its messages in a database format, and no one has ever raised an eyebrow. The backup and restore process in SharePoint ends up being quite similar to Exchange. In fact, Exchange stores its data in the JET database engine, which is even less robust that SQL. Microsoft has also certified their enterprise search engine to be able to index 50 million documents in a single SharePoint repository, and SharePoint can manipulate files in SQL faster than a traditional DMS can manipulate the files on a file system. All in all, it is our belief that this architectural design of SharePoint should not be a contributing factor in determining whether or not SharePoint is viable.

There are also some additional differences to keep in mind if you’re used to a traditional DMS:

Re-filing is more difficult in SharePoint. Metadata will not automatically update if you move documents between different matter libraries, and you’ll need some additional user training or third-party software.
Document permissions may be harder to keep track of. It’s important for the administrator to correctly assign permissions at the site or library level, and for users to individually secure their documents if need be.
Some features are only available in MOSS, the licensed version of SharePoint, such as document trail auditing.
The user interface is completely different. The firm will need to be open to working differently and retraining users.
SharePoint does not natively number documents—it only creates a unique URL for each document. We recommend an inexpensive tool from MacroView Wisdom for doing unique document numbering. Also worth noting is that SharePoint 2010 is supposed to natively support unique document numbering.
While SharePoint libraries can be viewed in Outlook, messages cannot be dragged into a SharePoint folder in Outlook. We recommend another tool from MacroView Wisdom for email management in Outlook. In addition, SharePoint Workspace 2010, which is a full desktop client for SharePoint, may alleviate some of this need in 2010.

As firms look for creative ways to cut costs, while maintaining functionality, it will be interesting to see if SharePoint gains momentum as a DMS in the legal community.

SharePoint WorkSpace 2010 – Groove, plus a desktop client for SharePoint

Michael Fettner — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:18:39 +0000

I recently downloaded the technical preview of SharePoint WorkSpace 2010, but was disappointed to find out that I couldn’t test any of the SharePoint features. It’s only compatible with SharePoint 2010, so anyone interested in exploring all of the new features will have to wait a few more weeks/months until the technical preview of SharePoint 2010 is made public.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 is the next version of Groove, the collaboration software acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Groove 2007 was only superficially integrated into the Office Suite, and never got a large following, as it was included in only the most expensive versions of Office, and most people had no idea what it was. SharePoint WorkSpace 2010 will be included in Office 2010 Professional Plus, on the other hand, allowing it to expand to a wider audience. Additionally, it will integrate seamlessly with SharePoint 2010 and other Office products.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 allows for the creation of “SharePoint Workspaces” and “Classic Workspaces.” SharePoint Workspaces allow you to access all SharePoint site content on your computer, whether online or offline. This is an improvement over SharePoint 2007, where only document libraries and certain types of lists could be synched with Outlook. While you had to go into a library’s action menu in SharePoint 2007 to connect it to Outlook, you can now connect the SharePoint 2010 complete site to SharePoint WorkSpace by clicking Site Actions –> Sync to Computer. Alternatively, you can sync to a site from inside SharePoint WorkSpace by creating a SharePoint Workspace and specifying the url.

Classic Workspaces are the workspaces that were available in Groove. Users can create document libraries, discussion threads, calendars, and invite other users and chat inside the workspace. Classic workspaces use peer-to-peer technology to synchronize documents and files between users. That allows users in different companies, on different networks, to still collaborate quickly and securely.

SharePoint WorkSpace 2010: New WorkSpace Menu

SharePoint WorkSpace 2010 is pretty much two products in one–A full client for SharePoint with offline syncing, and a peer-to-peer collaboration tool for collaboration without the need for a server. The Groove technology in the classic workspaces looks pretty good in the technical preview, but we’ll have to wait a bit more until we can test all the new things, such as taking a whole SharePoint site offline, and checking in and out SharePoint documents from within SharePoint WorkSpace.

SharePoint WorkSpace 2010: WorkSpace View