Hi everyone, I am Quentin Christensen and I work on document and records management functionality for SharePoint. Electronic discovery (commonly referred to as eDiscovery) is an area we are supporting with new set of capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010. In case you are not familiar with eDiscovery, it is the process of finding, preserving, analyzing and producing content in electronic formats as required by litigation or investigations. eDiscovery is an important concern for all of our customers and given that SharePoint has grown to be an integral part of collaboration, document, and records management for many organizations, we recognize the need to support the eDiscovery process for SharePoint content.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 included a hold feature that could be used for eDiscovery, but it was scoped to the Records Center site template. With SharePoint Server 2010 the eDiscovery capabilities have been greatly expanded to provide more functionality and the power to use these features across your entire SharePoint deployment.

In this post, I want to highlight three major improvements in SharePoint that support eDiscovery. You can:

• Manage holds and conduct eDiscovery searches on any site collection
• Use SharePoint Server Search or FAST Search for SharePoint out of box to search and process content
• Automatically copy eDiscovery search results to a separate repository for further analysis

Read on to learn how SharePoint Server 2010 can support your eDiscovery initiatives and provide you with the tools you need to manage holds, identify, and collect SharePoint content.

The eDiscovery Process

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model from EDRM (edrm.net) provides an overview of the different parts of the eDiscovery process:

SharePoint Sever 2010 addresses the Information Management, Identification, Preservation and Collection stages. While this blog post will focus mostly on the identification, preservation and collection components, SharePoint provides a rich Information Management platform for Collaboration, Social Computing, Document Management and Records Management.  This means that you can take a proactive approach to eDiscovery by putting a governance framework in place and using appropriate disposition policies to expire content. Managing content and deleting it when it is no longer needed will reduce the amount of content that must be indexed and searched, and collected for eDiscovery.  The result is that eDiscovery costs can be dramatically reduced, changing the problem from finding a needle in a hay stack to finding a needle in a hay bale. Ultimately, the key to achieving legal compliance for eDiscovery obligations is built upon a foundation of robust Information Management.

When an eDiscovery event occurs, such as a receipt of complaint, discovery, or notice of potential legal claim, the identification stage begins. Content that may be subject to eDiscovery must be identified and searches are conducted to find that content. That content needs to be preserved and at some point, the content will be collected.

The eDiscovery Features

Hold and eDiscovery

Hold and eDiscovery is a site level feature that can be activated on any site.

Activating this feature creates a new category in Site Settings that provides links to Holds and Hold Reports lists. There is also a page to discover and hold content that allows you to search for content and add it to a hold. Once the Hold and eDiscovery feature is activated you can create holds and add to hold any content in the site collection. By default only Site Collection administrators have access to the Hold and eDiscovery pages. To give other users permission, add them to the permissions list for the Hold Reports and Holds lists. This will also give access to the Discover and hold content page.

You can manually locate content in SharePoint and add it to a hold, or you can search for content and add the search results to a hold. With the Hold and eDiscovery feature you can create holds in the hold list and then manually add content to the relevant hold by clicking on Compliance Details from the drop down menu for individual items.

Then click on the link to Add/Remove from hold.

And you can select the relevant hold to add to or remove from.

By manually adding an item to hold you will block editing and deletion of that item until it is released from hold. You will notice that the document now has a lock icon showing that it cannot be edited or deleted.

Each night a report for each hold is generated by a timer job. If you need a hold report faster you can manually run the Hold Processing and Reporting timer job in Central Administration.

Search and Process

You can manually add items to hold on any site collection, which is great. But that doesn’t help you find the content you don’t already know about. What if you have a large amount of items you want to find and add to a hold? For that you can use the features on the Discover and hold content page, which is a settings page in Site Settings. From this page you can specify a search query and then preview the results. The configured search service (SharePoint Search Server or FAST Search for SharePoint) will automatically be used. You can then select the option to keep items on hold in place so they cannot be edited or deleted, or if you have configured a Content Organizer Send to location in Central Administration you can have content copied to another site and placed on hold. You may want to create a separate records center site for a particular hold to store all content related to that hold. The Content Organizer is a new SharePoint Server 2010 feature based on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Document Router with richer functionality to automatically classify content based on Content Type or metadata properties. Look for a future blog post covering the Content Organizer.

Holding content in place is recommended if you want to leave content in the location is was created with all the rich context that SharePoint provides, while blocking deletion and editing of content. Be aware that this will prevent users from modifying items. If you prefer users to continue editing documents, then use the copy to another location approach.

When searching and processing, the search will by default be scoped to the entire Site Collection and run with elevated permissions so all content can be discovered. The search can be scoped to specific sites and you can also preview search results before adding the results to a hold. Items can be placed on multiple holds and compliance details will show all of the holds that are applied to an item.

In summary, SharePoint Server 2010 contains key features that make it an essential aspect of your eDiscovery strategy. With the new SharePoint Server 2010 capabilities you can easily apply proper retention policies for all content and make it easier to discover content if an eDiscovery event occurs. eDiscovery often prescribes tight deadlines for production. SharePoint 2010 helps you find the right content and deliver it faster.

Quentin Christensen
Program Manager – Document and Records Management
Microsoft

As you can see from the last few posts, we are incredibly proud of the evolution of our ECM capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and in April, we are heading to the AIIM Expo in Philadelphia to give attendees the chance to try out SharePoint 2010 and hear directly from the people who built the product.  Starting on April 20th, we’ll open the doors on the SharePoint Experience Lab where you can learn about Office and SharePoint 2010, assisted by the ECM team from Redmond and some of our top field specialists.  The SharePoint Experience Lab will be in the Expo Hall where we will be joined by a number of our leading partners and best of all, if you register before the event, entry to the Expo Hall is ABSOLUTELY FREE!  That’s right, register now and you will get access to a wide range of SharePoint labs, supported by the team from Redmond.

In addition to the SharePoint Experience Lab, we are proud to support the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo.  The SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo consists of almost 30 sessions delivered by the SharePoint ECM Team, customers and leading industry analysts.  Entry to the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo is included with a conference pass that you can pick up for just $599 (UPDATE – Advanced registration has been extended.  Enter code A525G to receive a $50 discount).  Not a bad price to ask all the questions you ever wanted answered about SharePoint and get the inside scoop from senior product and program managers as well as Eric Swift, the General Manager of the SharePoint Marketing Group.

Here is an overview of the content being delivered by Microsoft speakers at the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo:

• Introducing SharePoint 2010
• ECM for the Masses: How SharePoint 2010 Delivers on the Promise
• SharePoint and Office: What’s New in 2010
• Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010
• Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010
• Growing SharePoint from Small Libraries to Large Scale Repositories & Massive Archives
• Visual Customization Overview: Theming & Branding For Any Site
• Using Enterprise Content Types & Managed Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010
• Using SharePoint Analytics and End User Feedback to Optimize the Content and Organization of your SharePoint Sites
• Document Management in SharePoint 2010
• Building Rich, Immersive Sites with Microsoft Tools &  Technologies
• Enterprise Search Overview
• Delivering BI to the Masses at Microsoft
• Building an Enterprise Knowledge Management Solution on SharePoint 2010
• Records Management Strategies in SharePoint 2010
• Better Together Collaboration with SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 & More!
• Managing and Sharing Digital Assets in SharePoint 2010
• If You Build It, They Will Come: Driving End User Adoption

With the launch of Office and SharePoint 2010 set for May 12th and our intent to RTM (Release to Manufacturing) this April 2010, there has never been a better time to hear from the team that built the product and get the knowledge you need to make SharePoint successful within your business.  Spring is coming to Philadelphia and with it comes SharePoint 2010 and the SharePoint ECM team.  We look forward to seeing you at the AIIM Expo.

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager – ECM and Compliance
Microsoft

Hello everyone! My name is Sangya Singh and I am a Program Manager on the SharePoint engineering team working on Web Content Management (WCM) features. We are very excited about the WCM capabilities that will be shipping in SharePoint 2010 and the possibilities they will open up for our customers to create rich WCM solutions. In this first post, I want to talk about the broad investments we have made in this release around WCM and share with you how we approached it from an engineering perspective.

Enabling different shades of WCM

Taking authoring to the next level

Making it easier to build richer sites

Richer publishing control and greater insight

Scalable platform to power your site

Enabling different shades of WCM

When most people hear WCM, they immediately think dot com, a public facing internet site.  A public facing site allows a company to drive brand awareness, deliver marketing campaigns, build community and share information about their products and services. The publishing process behind a public facing site is typically very structured to ensure a consistent look and feel, usage of approved branded assets and a more controlled approval process.  Public facing sites are just one use of WCM technology and most companies have far broader needs from a WCM platform.  If a public facing site is on one end of the spectrum then a solution like a Wiki is at the end other.  Wiki’s are community based and have lots of authors creating content in a very loosely controlled environment. Wiki authors have a lot more freedom on how their content is formatted and organized when compared with a public facing site.  There are many shades in-between these two scenarios requiring varying degrees of branding and governance so when we built the WCM features in SharePoint 2010 we set out to empower the business to easily adjust the dial between freedom and control from one site to the next.

Taking authoring to the next level

A modern WCM system has to meet many needs across a business but the number one goal has always be to empower the people who own and create content to easily publish content.  With a renewed focus on web analytics, search engine optimization, campaign management and personalization, many businesses and vendors have lost sight of the end user.  By empowering content creators, you can rapidly remove the friction between the business and IT ensuring that you can drive content to the right audience in a timely manner.  To empower the end user, you need to provide an intuitive user experience that helps employees author and publish content effectively without needing specialized technical skill.  Jim Masson discussed the notion of ECM for the masses in his blog ‘SharePoint 2010 Delivering on the promise’, giving insights in to how we think about empowering users and the list below outlines some of the key user experience enhancements that we made in SharePoint 2010:

Quick access to the tools and actions you use most often

The most notable visual change in SharePoint 2010 is the introduction of the “Ribbon” from the Office applications.  The Ribbon provides a consistent experience and makes it easy for users to discover the rich features in SharePoint.  What’s more, the Ribbon enables quick access to the most common functionality based on the specific task that you are working on.  So, let’s say you are authoring a page that requires you to add text, images and videos.  When you’re typing, the Ribbon will show you text formatting options like styles, fonts, bold, italics etc.  When you click on a video player web part you get options like changing the size of the media player, whether or not the video starts when the page loads or whether the video should loop once it finishes…

Text formatting options available when adding text

Media configuration options are displayed when Media web part is selected

One-click page creation

In SharePoint 2010, one-click page creation allows you to simply enter the page title then you can immediately start authoring the page. 

Unlike SharePoint 2007, authors can get into creating their page content by just specifying the page name.

Dynamically changing Page Layout

Page Layouts (templates) provide a way to apply a consistent look and feel to a page.  In SharePoint 2010, changing page layout is as easy as picking a layout from a gallery in the Ribbon while the author is editing the page.

The Page Layout ribbon drop-down is available to pick and choose from.

New and improved Rich Text Editor

The new and improved Rich Text Editor (RTE) provides a “Word-like” editing experience that most people take for granted in a non-browser world.  The RTE in SharePoint 2010 provides rich formatting of text, live preview of formatting options, easy embedding of images and videos directly into the RTE and drag and drop capability to place them exactly where you want. 

Easy to add rich media

SharePoint 2010 makes it easy for authors to select and add rich media content (like images, audio, video and Silverlight controls) to their pages.  Authors have quick access to Media, Video and Silverlight Web Parts that they can add to their pages.  We’ve also introduced a new experience for selecting rich media content that has features like getting to preview and play the video before you select it.

Support for a wider range of web browsers

With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010, we will be supporting Internet Explorer 7 & 8.0 as well as the latest versions of Firefox and Safari.  This allows users to use their browser of choice when working with SharePoint.

Making it easier to build richer sites

Many people still think of SharePoint as an intranet platform but with customers like Ferrari and AMD betting on our platform for their .com presence, you’re probably asking yourself, how can I use SharePoint to help me build a rich, immersive and accessible web site?  The following features would help with that question:

Rich media integration

Earlier I discussed the new web parts in SharePoint 2010 that allow you to add rich media to your pages. To support these web parts, we’ve developed a specialized Asset Library that is optimized for storing, managing and navigating large volumes of rich media including images, audio and video files. We’ve also made investments to ensure that key metadata is promoted from these assets when you upload them to the Asset Library.

The new Asset Library showcasing viewing of assets in thumbnail view and metadata driven navigation

A dialog showing information about an asset as the user’s mouse hovers over it in the Asset Library.

You can preview the video in the hover over dialog before you select the video.

To deliver rich media, we’ve included a customizable Silverlight media player that allows you to customize the ‘skin’ to meet your specific visual needs.

Silverlight based player for playing rich media in SharePoint

Dynamic content

If you want to quickly build landing pages or show dynamic content roll-ups, then you can easily use the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). If you have been developing web sites with SharePoint 2007, then you have no doubt used used this web part. In SharePoint 2010, we’ve made a lot of enhancements to the CQWP. These enhancements support content to content targeting where the query defined in the CQWP can now filter on metadata on the items being queried or a value passed to the page in the URL query string.  This rapidly enables scenarios where you need to show related data like services, product sheets, help topics or community content like blogs and wikis. The blog post on Introducing Document Management in 2010 discusses one such scenario with a CQWP. There are other improvements made where data view mapping can now be done via the CQWP tool pane UI.

Managed Metadata tagging

SharePoint 2010 introduces a powerful set of features around defining and managing taxonomies and then leveraging those “terms” to tag content in SharePoint.  Leveraging these managed metadata fields in web content enables scenarios around showing dynamic content (discussed above), driving dynamic navigation based on metadata and helps with search engine optimization.

Well-formed mark-up

We made investments in developing and testing against W3C WCAG 2.0 guidelines at the AA level and ensuring that the mark-up within our pages (e.g.  page layouts, master pages, content generated in the RTE) is well formed XHTML. This improves accessibility and cross-browser support for sites built on SharePoint.  In cases where authors have added content that does not contain well-formed mark-up, we offer a “Convert to XHTML” function in the Ribbon that scrubs the current page mark-up, converting it to well formed XHTML. 

Community building tools

The social computing investments in SharePoint 2010 enable scenarios where readers of your site can tag, rate and comment on site content. In addition, you can leverage SharePoint blogs and wikis within your site to foster community and user contributed content so you can easily incorporate social features in your web sites using SharePoint 2010.

Rating control shows the average rating in the form of 1 to 5 stars. And the mouse over tool tip shows the how the user rated the content.

Richer publishing control and greater insight

The publishing platform in SharePoint allows you to control what flexibility is available to authors, how sophisticated the approval process needs to be for content to go live, how the content should be organized in your site, how to orchestrate publishing in different parallel sites and whether to separate the authoring and staging environment from your live site.  We’ve also included tools to help you gain insight into what is going on with your site. 

Control over what authors can do

Depending on the needs of your site and authors, you can control the functionality available during content creation.  You can make all the text formatting options available or only allow the use of predefined markup styles that follow the consistent look and feel of your site while generating well-formed markup. You can give authors the freedom to insert any web part or have the specific, approved web parts available in the page layout.

Orchestrate publishing across different parallel sites

In SharePoint 2007, we introduced the Variations feature.  One application of this feature is to support multilingual publishing scenarios where you want to orchestrate publishing between your source site and other global sites that will translate content in to a different language.  We have introduced improvements in the translation pipeline to make it easy for someone working in a localized site to understand what has changed in the source site. Users will have 1-click access to a view of what has changed in the latest version of the source page so they can decide what they need to translate or if they need to translate anything at all.

Ribbon action available to the authors on the target sites, to view what changed on the latest version of the page sent by the source site.

We’ve also made improvements around reliability and server citizenship. We’ve moved Variation operations to timer jobs.  We support pause and resume during timer service recycles to improve the reliability of long-running operations in large deployments. We give a lot more control to IT on when the expensive process of creating hierarchies should happen.    It is also worth noting that the feature set in Variations is complementary to a set of new investments in SharePoint 2010 around Multi-language User Interface (MUI).  MUI is the technology that helps SharePoint present all application UI in the preferred language of the user of the site.  The combination of Variations and MUI investments provides a great story for managing the translation of your content and managing the display of the SharePoint UI giving a unified experience in multilingual sites.

Deploying content from authoring/staging environment to the live environment

The Content Deployment feature was added in SharePoint 2007 to address requirements for companies hosting their internet sites on SharePoint and wanting a separate environments for authors to modify and review content before it was published to the public facing farm.  In SharePoint 2010, we have made significant investments to improve the reliability of the Content Deployment feature.  In addition, we’ve made a lot of these reliability improvements available to SharePoint 2007 customers through cumulative updates.  Additionally, we’ve made changes to the platform to take advantage of database snapshots to better improve scenarios where authoring on site is going on while the Content Deployment job is running. You can take advantage of this feature if you have SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Enterprise edition. We also provide better logging to get provide insight into Content Deployment jobs.

Publishing workflows

Depending on the type of WCM deployment you have, you can decide how simple or sophisticated your publishing approval process needs to be. You can decide that you don’t need any approval process in place or use simple out-of-box parallel or serial approval workflows or customize the out-of box workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010 to model your business process. We now enable business users to model their workflow in Microsoft Visio 2010 which can then be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010.  Another great advantage of building in Visio is that SharePoint uses a new feature, Visio Services to deliver workflow visualization, showing exactly where in the process the workflow is currently executing.  We’ve also made improvements in this release where you can reuse the workflow you have created and apply to content types and site templates. 

Web Analytics

An important part of any site is understanding what is going on with the content, users and the servers powering the site. SharePoint 2010 provides a range of new Web Analytics capabilities that monitor different aspects of site usage.  In addition to the out of box reports, you can subscribe to alerts to monitor changes on key metrics.  Beyond traffic insight, there is support for search insight around search queries, popular terms and queries that are succeeding or failing.  It also recommends new best bets for the search system by watching what links people are clicking on the search result page so you can promote these to the top of the page.

A report showing information over time on number of page views on the site.               

Server Health Monitoring

SharePoint 2010 has made some big investments in logging infrastructure from the analytic side that will help you monitor the performance of your SharePoint deployment.  You can now easily find the slowest pages (in terms of rendering) on your site.  So in case you have customization where you have one or more Content Query Web Parts making expensive queries and forgot to turn on caching then we’ll help you find that page.  Since sites are highly customized with custom web parts and field controls, we’ve introduced the Developer Dashboard feature that allows a developer investigating why a certain page renders slowly to see at a page level which queries went to SQL backend and how long they took. Introduction of Sandboxed solutions allows site administrators to upload custom code that runs in its own sandbox in a way that it can be monitored and throttled so it doesn’t impact the quality of service to other users on the farm.

Scalable platform to power your site

There are a number of investments made in the platform to ensure continued performance and scalability as your site grows.

Large Pages Library and the Content Organizer

We have made improvements in SharePoint 2010 to support thousands of pages in a given pages library but more importantly, we’ve introduced the ability to organize pages in folders with a Pages Library.  A new feature called Content Organizer can be leveraged to better organize your web content by setting rules that will decide where page should go.  This allows the authors to concentrate on authoring the content and the Content Organizer uses rules to drive the page to the right location.  With the investment in large lists, SharePoint 2010 also gives IT the ability to govern how these items are accessed by introducing resource throttling to be able to limit the number of items accessed in a view or a CQWP as an example.

Optimization of the Content Query Web Part

As mentioned earlier, the CQWP can show dynamic content based on a query.  In this release we have made query optimizations that leverage indices available on the list that CQWP queries.

Support for streaming rich media

We’ve put a lot plumbing into the product to ensure that the end-user experience of viewing and streaming rich media on your site is smooth and the impact on your network and SQL backend is minimized.  The BLOB cache on the web front ends (WFE) has been optimized to read content from SQL in small chunks and start sending the file to the client immediately so the user doesn’t have to wait for the whole file to download.  The BLOB cache can also serve requests for parts of the file to the client.  So if the user wants to skip to the last chapter in the video and the entire file hasn’t been downloaded yet, the BLOB cache can serve that part of the video immediately.

I hope this post gives you a good introduction to the new and improved WCM capabilities in SharePoint 2010 that allow you to deliver great web sites with rich media, dynamic content and an intuitive user experience for content authors. We look forward to discussing these areas in depth with you in upcoming blog posts and would love to hear your feedback on the investments we’ve made in SharePoint 2010.

Thanks for reading. 

Sangya Singh

Lead Program Manager

Hi everyone. It’s Adam here again – this time I want to talk to you today about another key area of the content management world: Document Management (DM). Over the next few months, you’ll be hearing from several members of the engineering team about new DM features that help you get the most value out of your document corpus. We’ll also discuss how key early adopters of SharePoint 2010 used new DM features to solve the toughest information governance challenges.

Today, though, I’d like to spend time talking about what the team has learned about the document management space since SharePoint 2007 and take you on a journey through the key tenets that guided our DM vision this release.

Recap: Document Management in SharePoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 was the first release where SharePoint really broke out of its collaboration role and enabled customers to apply structure and management to their document libraries. A lot of the key DM infrastructure was established in that release: Check in/Check Out, Major/Minor Versioning, Per-Item Permissions, Content Types, Workflows, and the Recycle Bin are just a few examples. Of course, all of these features tightly integrated with the Office client applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to make it simple for end users to interact with the document repository (a core design tenet that carries through in 2010).

Features like these enabled customers to start creating high-value knowledge repositories on SharePoint 2007.

For 2010, we looked to build off of 2007’s gigantic success, and we rallied our designs around three key ideas:

Tenet #1: Manage the unmanaged

As we looked at how our customers were starting to use the 2007 system’s DM features, we noticed an interesting trend: These features were not just part of managed document repository deployments. Indeed, the traditional DM features were getting heavy usage in average collaborative team sites as well. Customers were using them to apply policy and structure as well as gather insights from what otherwise would have been fairly unmanaged places. SharePoint was being using to pull more and more typically unstructured silos into the ECM world.

This is a key insight that really drove our investments in SharePoint 2010. For instance, one of our key new features in SharePoint 2010 is the notion of a Document Set. You can think of a document set as a “folder on steroids.” It allows you to group related documents together so that they share metadata and have a common homepage, workflows, and archival process:

The Welcome Page of a document set is a customizable page that allows users to discover the content in the set, view and sync metadata between items in the set, and manage the set.

When it came time to design this feature, we knew people would want to use it to manage very structured and rigid official processes (e.g. a pharmaceutical company submitting forms to a regulatory agency). But equally important to us was that the feature can be used in a lightweight team site to manage most processes that requires multiple documents to be bound together (e.g. a team that just needs to put together a pitch book/sales proposal that includes a PowerPoint deck, a spreadsheet of costs, and a document that describes the sales pitch).

Enabling the document set feature to be used informally and easily is one way we are expanding the value of ECM in the minds of SharePoint end users.

Tenet #2: Social computing and enterprise metadata are game changers.

As we started to design out the DM feature set for this release, we quickly realized the power of metadata – both structured taxonomies as well as lightweight folksonomies (keywords) – as transformative forces in the document management space. A SharePoint 2010 document repository would need to take full advantage of both concepts.

There are two key principles that enable SharePoint 2010 users to take advantage of metadata. First is on the tagging side: it’s easy for a site to use enterprise wide content types and taxonomies and it’s also simple for a user to tag with them.

SharePoint 2010 offers consistent management of metadata that any SharePoint site can hook in to with virtually no effort. This allows the entire enterprise to be talking the same language. Tangibly, you can do things such as define the list of products you sell once and have that data available in any SharePoint site.

Note how the type-ahead functionality makes it easy for a user to pick a value from this folksonomy. Also note how the West Coast tag was automatically filled out for the user because it was set as the default value for all documents in this library.

The second key principle is how SharePoint takes advantage of these tags. For instance, a SharePoint 2010 document library can be configured to use metadata as a primary navigation pivot. You can think of metadata based navigation as a virtual folder structure that can be used to filter the items in the library:

Instead of navigating by traditional folders, a user filtered the library to the virtual folder that contains just sales materials about Contoso’s tent products.

It’s a virtuous cycle here: Easy metadata entry allows items to be tagged, which can drive navigation. And because users need the metadata to navigate the repository, this incentivizes them to tag the items!

Tenant #3: The browser as a powerful document management application.

SharePoint has always been used for many scenarios, but perhaps it’s known best for two things:

· A best of breed tool for creating web pages and sites

· A place to store, manage, and collaborate on documents

SharePoint 2010 makes a big bet that creating a knowledge management repository requires the merger of both of these worlds. The browser is increasingly becoming the key technology for information workers – both inside the corporate firewall and on the consumer front. Sure, people will always want to download documents to take with them – but they also want to use the browser to interact with the document and see a wealth of context about the document (e.g. metadata, related documents, wiki pages about the document’s topic).

It’s time for the industry to expect any document management system to also be great at creating pages or wikis that add context to the documents’ content. And any system that doesn’t is going to start looking antiquated.

SharePoint 2010 delivers on this vision in a few different ways. First, if you’ve installed the Office Web Apps (licensed as part of the Office 2010 suite), the default click for a document library can be configured to load Office documents in the browser:

Without ever leaving the browser, users can quickly view Office documents stored in SharePoint.

Second, we spent a lot of time this release thinking about how the web content management features can be used in document repositories. For instance, the ever popular Content Query web part can be used to roll up all the documents related to a particular topic:

A content steward might create a page about a particular topic (e.g. a new product). This page includes text about the product, marketing pictures, as well as roll ups of all the documents tagged with the product.

This vision allows you to combine two very powerful aspects of SharePoint into one solution to your organization’s knowledge discovery problem. It’s a merger of an enterprise wiki and a traditional enterprise document repository.

Wrapping up: A lot more to come!

I hope this post gives some context on where we are going with document management in SharePoint 2010 and beyond. Feature wise, we really only hit a few of the many DM features that make up SharePoint 2010 – stay tuned for future posts as we deep dive into a lot more! And feel free to leave comments about what you’d like us to blog about (especially if you’ve downloaded the Beta and given SharePoint 2010 a test drive already!)

Thanks for reading.

Adam Harmetz

Lead Program Manager, Document and Records Management