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Jan
12
SharePoint 2009 Crystal Ball – Lee Reed
The BPOS Cloud will Take Off in the SMB Space
Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services will gain significant traction in the SMB space with regards to Exchange, SharePoint and OCS. All of these technologies will further drive company’s focus on social computing and information sharing to the benefit of the entire organization. As more college students graduate with the expectation that these technologies will be in place within a company, SharePoint’s offerings will continue to be enhanced and all companies, large or small, will be able to participate in the party.
Governance and Best Practices will Take Off
Those companies that never took the building of a SharePoint governance plan seriously will see their environments continue to grow and, eventually, spin out of control. Information Architecture will be a primary focus in the SharePoint space. Administrators will see their users flounder to provide business solutions on the platform and will begin to produce documents that outline SharePoint’s best practices for their environment. This practice will spill over into other Information Systems in use in the environment, especially in mid-size companies that never gave governance documents a second thought.
Silverlight will offer Interactivity Options
SharePoint will begin to look, act and feel like the best web sites on the internet. Interactivity and ease of use will be a big focus and Silverlight will be a big part of the solutions offered. The dragging and dropping of information on the SharePoint ‘desktop’, single web part updating and refresh, SharePoint list printing and all of the other things that make web sites easy to use will be delivered on the SharePoint platform thanks to Silverlight.
Multi-Media Capabilities will be Significantly Enhanced
SharePoint’s hosting of large multi-media files will be enhanced and video, podcasts and training materials will be hosted and served up by SharePoint directly without the use of Media Server. These enhancements will be provided by Silverlight solutions offered both by third-parties and by Microsoft and by enhancements that will be made in the SharePoint architecture.
Portable SharePoint Designer Workflows
There will be an enhancement made to the SharePoint environment that will allow the user community to reuse SharePoint Designer workflows on multiple lists. This will be provided by a ‘workflow gallery’, similar to the ‘web part gallery’ that users utilize today to add web parts to a page. This will give content owners the ability to select workflows they previously created and apply it to any list where it can be utilized.
Disassociated SharePoint Lists
The combination of Vista, Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 will allow the end user to place SharePoint lists and BDC connections on their desktop as a gadget. The information will be portable and will update anytime the user has a connection to the environment. This will free users from the requirement of visiting an existing SharePoint site to gather information. Instead, the information will be delivered to them in a portable format.
SharePoint RPC over HTTP
In a similar fashion to Exchange’s ability to provide a secure, remote connection to deliver e-mail without requiring a VPN connection, the SharePoint architecture will be extended to allow users to open desktop-based reports, gadgets and other portable SharePoint information remotely. This will allow the user to determine their ‘best parts’ of SharePoint and have them travel with them on a laptop or Windows Mobile phone without the requirement of Outlook 2007’s ability to take information off-line.
Secured Views…Finally!
Microsoft will enhance a line or three of code and allow the end user to secure SharePoint list views so that either user security or audiences can be applied to them. This will greatly enhance the focus of development professionals to extend the current abilities that SharePoint’s views have with the result being that views will look, feel and act more like live reports that offer sorting and enterprise level filtering-by-form.
SharePoint List Column Security
The ability will be made available in the SharePoint interface to secure a list column differently than the list itself. This will ease the burden of content owners as they will be able to use a single list for both management and non-management employees to view information. The result will be a reduced burden on the SharePoint content owners and administrators and will enhance the perception in the general user community that SharePoint is a good location to maintain secured data.
Wizards will Begin to Appear
No, I haven’t had too much egg-nog. SharePoint wizards will begin to take off. For example, when a user creates a site, a wizard will run that will allow the user to choose which specific SharePoint lists and capabilities they would like to use on the site. The capabilities available to the site creator will be maintained by the SharePoint Farm administrator. This will free SharePoint administrators from the creation of multiple, only-slightly similar templates and will empower the user to easily build their own powerful SharePoint sites on-the-fly without having to create a site and spend an hour deleting and adding specific lists and features to the site.
CQWP will be more Configurable and Accessible
The Content Query Web Part will be enhanced so that its configuration will be easier and it will allow the ever-elusive content roll-ups that content owners desire so strongly. With several check boxes, the content owners will be able to tell this powerful web part that they want ALL tasks for ALL sites that fall below the one they are placing the web part on, that they want the CQWP to personalize the user’s view of the tasks and that they want the task description column, due date column and percentage complete column. Nice and easy!
My Site Tabs
SharePoint will allow content owners to place their own navigation tabs in the global navigation on SharePoint My Sites. The proper content owner or administrator will be able to add a tab to everyone’s My Site to allow them to get to performance metrics, their 2009 goals or a listing of their specific project sites complete with personalized project tasks and announcements rolled up from the project sites.
Mark Me Up!
SharePoint Wiki’s will receive all of the powerful markup tags that just about every other Wiki platform makes available. These tags will drive a dramatic adoption of Wiki’s in the user community and administrators will being to fight that user community to reduce their dependency on Wiki’s and continue building sites using core SharePoint functionality.
Author: Lee Reed
ThoughtBridge, Atlanta, GA
Lee Reed is an expert in collaboration and user adoption on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform. His consulting with companies large and small throughout the East Coast has resulted in many successful collaboration environments and increased user adoption.
Lee is currently the Director of Business Process and SharePoint Education for Thoughtbridge, a Microsoft Gold Partner focused exclusively on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform.
