Ballmer Outlines SharePoint 2010 Strategy

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the company's SharePoint user conference in Las Vegas today to introduce new features included with SharePoint 2010, and said the collaboration platform will be available as a public beta next month along with Office 2010.

SharePoint is emerging as one of Microsoft's most important products because it allows enterprise customers to share documents created using Word, Excel and PowerPoint without any loss of formatting or work process fidelity, and has thus become one of the company's last points of defense against the incursion of Google Docs and other online and open source productivity application vendors into Office's territory.

Here's a snapshot of the SharePoint 2010 interface:

Microsoft hopes that enhancements to SharePoint 2010 also meet market expectations for collaboration, which is becoming an increasingly popular tool for customers, particularly with the advent of online collaboration platforms.

Ballmer said, "SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date." He added that, "when paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business.”

New features include:

• A new ribbon user interface that mimics the Office 2007 and Office 2010 interface;
• Improved, so-called "Deep Office" integration for improved document life-cycle management and protection for embedded work processes;
• Business Connectivity Services, which allow developers to connect capabilities to line-of-business data or Web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client;
• Additional Web content management features with built-in accessibility through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, multilingual support and one-click page layout, enabling customers to distribute access to SharePoint Server sites;
• New SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010;
• APIs and support for representational state transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), to help developers build applications on the SharePoint platform.

SharePoint 2010 will also be available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool, and will include Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services that allow users to manage interactive forms across their organization.