SharePoint Sites
A Single Infrastructure for All Your Business Web Sites

New and Improved

• SharePoint Ribbon user interface
• Easy Web editing
• Cross-browser support and improved mobile experience
• SharePoint Workspace 2010
• Office Web Applications
• Personalization

Standards and Accessibility

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides a comprehensive platform that companies can scale to meet business needs while simplifying how people find and share information. It provides a full set of tools that people can use to create any kind of site, plus a single infrastructure that simplifies site management. From a team site for colleagues, to an extranet site for partners, to an Internet site for customers, people can share and publish information using one familiar system.

The capabilities included in SharePoint Sites are based on a simple and powerful site framework, the management tools included in SharePoint 2010, and enhanced capabilities that help people extend the SharePoint platform and customize SharePoint sites.

SharePoint Ribbon User Interface

SharePoint 2010 features the Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface, including the ribbon user interface. The SharePoint Ribbon user interface offers an extensible, seamless, and familiar user experience across client and server applications, and people can customize it to address specific business and usability needs.

Figure 2 SharePoint Ribbon

Easy Web Editing

Sites in SharePoint 2010 contain the same list and libraries as previous versions of SharePoint, but the site is now a collection of pages. Because SharePoint sites focus more on pages than collections of lists, people can better control sites. People can quickly and easily create and edit pages within sites using the tabs and groups in the SharePoint Ribbon and a consistent, contextual rich text editor. The resulting experience is very similar to editing content in an application such as Microsoft Office Word®, making it easy and intuitive for people to create and edit SharePoint sites.

People can also easily work together to change existing pages with wiki technology in SharePoint 2010 team site pages. To edit content on a page, people can simply click the Edit tab type on the page. To enhance content, people can embed Web Parts, media files, and SharePoint lists in the page with a single click.

Cross-Browser Support and Improved Mobile Experience

As more organizations want to increase productivity within a diverse environment and a mobile workforce, SharePoint 2010 now supports not only Microsoft Internet Explorer®, but also Firefox and Safari. With any of these browsers, people can view and edit sites, and work with content effectively with a high-quality experience.

SharePoint 2010 also offers support for multiple micro-browsers, helping more people work together while using mobile devices. People can view and edit Office documents, browse SharePoint document libraries, and search for content and people.

SharePoint Workspace 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 is the rich desktop client for SharePoint 2010 that helps people work together, even when they’re not connected to a network. When people work in SharePoint Workspace while connected to a network, their changes within the client immediately appear in the corresponding SharePoint site. When people work offline, SharePoint Workspace caches any changes and automatically synchronizes the changes when connected to the SharePoint site. In SharePoint Workspace 2010, people can take offline the content of entire sites, including custom lists and line-of-business data, and can integrate Microsoft InfoPath® 2010 forms for richer data entry and data validation.

Figure 3 SharePoint Workspace 2010 with InfoPath forms

Office Web Applications

When people are on the go, they may not have access to the Office applications like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office Excel®. SharePoint 2010 works with the Web companions to the most popular Office applications, so people can access documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and notes without worrying about whether the computer they use has the latest Office programs installed. The Office Web applications for Word, Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint®, and Microsoft Office OneNote® add convenience by making it easier for people to view and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or notes when away from the office, including concurrent editing capabilities (co-authoring).

Figure 4 Viewing and editing Office documents with the Word Web application

 

Personalization
Multilingual User Interface (MUI)

Many organizations have employees who speak different native languages or send employees across borders as part of their jobs. SharePoint 2010 makes it easier for those employees to interact with people and content while using an interface in the language of their choice. After site administrators install the required language packs and activate the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) service, people can switch between languages and have their sites’ chrome use texts (strings) in the language they’ve chosen.

With the MUI in SharePoint 2010, site owners can configure fields within lists to support multiple languages. And when people create new content, they can also submit translations of the content so other users can view the content in specified languages.

Figure 5 Switching between pre-configured languages

Audience Targeting

In SharePoint 2010, people can target content to audiences defined by rules, SharePoint groups, or memberships in distribution lists. People can target any list item¡Xnot just lists¡Xand can target virtually any individual item within the site (for example, documents, events, Web Parts).

People can target Web Part content in two ways:

• Configure Web Parts Pages to display different Web Parts based on audience membership.
• Configure Web Parts to display different content based on audience membership.

 

For example, in a default area called Human Resources, a site administrator can create a Manager Resources Web Part that appears only to users who are members of a manager audience (for example, managers). The site administrator can also target specific news items in the News Web Part to only new employees.

Audiences are created through the Central Administration site of a server farm, and are defined and managed from within the Profile Service application. Administrators configure one or more rules that define who belongs to the audience. Then a scheduled process analyzes the user profile database and finds all people whose profiles match the defined rules. For more complex rules, SharePoint 2010 provides the Audience object model, which administrators can access to create and modify audiences.

Web Parts

SharePoint 2010 builds and improves on the powerful Web Part model of SharePoint Server 2007 and includes a variety of new Web Parts that let people easily customize their SharePoint sites and Web pages to address their specific needs. This comprehensive set of additional Web Parts is suitable for a wide range of additional applications in areas such as business data access, RSS feed monitoring, key performance indicators (KPIs), summary links, and searches. For more details on the full complement of pre-built Web Parts, consult the SharePoint 2010 documentation.

People can edit pages within SharePoint sites, rapidly generating content and updates. With proper permissions, people can insert Web Parts within content blocks on a page and quickly create lists while editing the page. The contents of the list are displayed using one of the out-of-the-box list Web Parts inline in the content.

Though all pages have a shared view, people can create a personalized view of the page. People can close a Web Part or add a new Web Part to their personalized view without affecting the view across the company.

Standards and Accessibility

SharePoint 2010 features a significantly improved implementation method that follows industry Web development standards (for example, XHTML), delivers a more accessible interface for people with disabilities (follows the WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines), and supports more of the major browsers.