The complete guide to Office 2010: Business

Posted on 24 Feb 2010 at 16:52

The Office Web Applications integrate seamlessly with SharePoint 2010 (including SharePoint Foundation), allowing users to view and make simple edits to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents without launching the full applications. Microsoft has also expanded the social-networking side of SharePoint, with the addition of status updates, activity feeds, interest tags and bookmarks to My Sites and user profiles.

To aid searching and knowledge mining, SharePoint now includes taxonomies and “folksonomies” (a poncey term for collaborative tagging) as well as extensive use of metadata. Documents are also now tagged with a unique ID when they’re stored in SharePoint so they can always be retrieved, even if they’re moved to a different folder or library. Users can group several documents together into a Document Set that shares common metadata and can be involved as a single unit in a Workflow.

Lines of Business data held in SQL Server and other databases can be surfaced in SharePoint to be viewed and edited using standard SharePoint forms or forms designed in InfoPath. You can even mark these external lists as matching Outlook form types, and view and edit the same information in Outlook. Changes made in Outlook or SharePoint are then automatically synchronised back to the underlying SQL Server database.