SharePoint Content
ECM for the Masses

New and Improved

• Document management
• Records management
• Rich media management
• Web content management

SharePoint 2010 blends the worlds of traditional content management, social computing, and search to deliver an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform that is accessible to everyone. SharePoint is easy to use and provides rich policy and process, helping companies manage a broad range of information from creation to disposition. It provides a single platform for managing documents, records, Web content, and rich media, helping companies reduce their IT spending by consolidating multiple systems.

Document Management

SharePoint 2010 includes a broad collection of new capabilities that simplify and streamline how companies manage documents. This is achieved by designing features that can be applied across an entire deployment, regardless of its size, and ensuring that policies are consistently and effectively implemented.

Content Organizer

People using enterprise content management solutions often face challenges: Where should new content be saved and how should it be classified? SharePoint 2010 addresses these challenges with the Content Organizer, a rules-based classification engine that promotes consistent classification of content based on Content Type and specific metadata properties. Site owners can create rules to drive content to specific Document Libraries and folders, where they inherit access control policy, default metadata values, and specific retention schedules.

Document Sets

People often create multiple documents that support a single case or project. By using SharePoint 2010, they can group all of these documents into a single entity. All documents in a Document Set exist as unique entities; but the set can share metadata properties, and people can apply workflows and versioning to the Document Set as a whole. Each Document Set has a customizable welcome page that displays shared metadata properties and can be used to display standard processes, workflow stages, and other setrelated information. Like other Web Part pages, the welcome page can be customized to meet specific requirements.

Figure 12 Document Set welcome page

Document IDs

In any content management repository or collaboration environment, content is often reorganized or moved. Hyperlinks to documents no longer work, which causes frustration and loss of efficiency. SharePoint 2010 offers a new capability that assigns documents a unique identification number. Each document has a "permalink" based on its unique ID, which lets people retrieve the document regardless of where it is within a SharePoint deployment.

Managed Metadata Service

As companies worldwide receive increasing amounts of unstructured content, people are having more difficulty finding desired content with full text searching and basic keyword terms. However, if content owners tag documents with metadata, providing accurate details on the nature of the information, people can find that content more easily. SharePoint 2010 helps people easily tag content with metadata through auto completion and taxonomy-browsing tools. Using that metadata, SharePoint 2010 improves the process of finding content by providing search refiners and metadata-driven navigation. People can use metadata-driven navigation from within SharePoint or through Office applications to find the content they need without knowing where it is stored.

Figure 13 Metadata-based navigation used in PowerPoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 includes other metadata features, such as content ratings and Content Types. People can use Content Types to categorize content in a way that is meaningful and to specify the metadata properties, policies, workflows, and other rules for specific types of content (for example, press releases, legal contracts, project plans, financial reports). Content Types support an inheritance model, so site owners can define more specific Content Types with process and policy that are related to specific parts of the company. In SharePoint 2010, people can reuse Content Types across SharePoint Sites Collections and Farms, helping to ensure consistent application of process and policy in company-wide deployments.

Records Management

SharePoint 2010 broadens the scope of records management by delivering core capabilities across the entire SharePoint platform. As a result, people can declare all content within SharePoint as records, and companies can manage a central records archive or support in-place records management. SharePoint 2010 makes it easier for companies to drive transparent, intuitive records management. Companies can better adhere to corporate policy and increase accuracy of content classification, making it easier for records managers to manage and monitor records management solutions.

In-Place Records Management

In SharePoint 2010, records management features are available in all site collections (not just in the Records Center) for everyone to use. Site administrators and records managers can work together to decide which records management capabilities to include in any site collection, or whether they will maintain a central records archive to store all official records. By supporting in-place records management, site administrators and records managers can store records and documents within the collaborative environment, retaining the documents’ rich context.

While all content in SharePoint should have policy attached, people can declare a document as an in-place record either manually or automatically by using workflow activities. After a document is declared as a record, it is locked from future editing or deletion. Records are denoted by a lock image on the file and continue to reside with other content in the same document library.

Figure 14 Declaring a record in a document library

Rich Media Management

SharePoint 2010 includes enhanced management and presentation of multimedia content including Asset Libraries and the Media Player Web Part.

Asset Library

The Asset Library template is a library template that people can use with digital media like video, audio, and image files. In an asset library, metadata columns are automatically populated with information about the assets by inspecting embedded details such as EXIF data. This metadata is then available to refine search results or, through metadata-driven navigation, to allow people to quickly find and use content. People can also configure folders within lists and libraries to automatically apply default metadata properties (for example, adding a “year=2010” tag to all documents within the “2010” folder). Content owners can easily add media to content pages by searching through a central asset library using the media metadata in the filtering criteria.

Figure 15 Digital Asset Library with a metadata-driven navigation pane

Media Player Web Part

SharePoint 2010 includes improved support for streaming video and audio. People can add a customizable Microsoft Silverlight™ Media Player Web Part to any site, wiki page, or Web publishing page to stream media.

Web Content Management

With the powerful Web content management features in SharePoint 2010, companies can host rich, dynamic Web sites. The rich editing controls and robust publishing infrastructure helps content owners to easily create, publish, and maintain content pages with appropriate controls over branding, page layout, and publishing approval.

Rich Authoring

SharePoint 2010 helps people quickly and simply create content. People can increase the quality and shorten the timelines of content with the Ribbon UI and fewer clicks to create and publish a page.

Figure 16 Simple publishing of Web pages

Web Analytics

SharePoint 2010 delivers improved Web Analytics, providing detailed reports on user activity, content inventory, and search use. People can configure analysis reports to show activity for an entire SharePoint Web application down to a single SharePoint site. People can also create custom reports that use the Web Analytics data repository, allowing site owners to further analyze specific details. Using the reports generated by Web Analytics, new Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 display popular content and the results of popular queries.