For years people have struggled with SharePoint. The concept is a good one but the implementation left much to be desired (yes, I hear the huge roar of swearing). Even with the current production release, something as simple as deployment of a Web Part was a real pain in the you-know-what.
Well, it looks like things are finally looking up for SharePoint developers everywhere. Enter SharePoint 2010. Apparently Microsoft has seen that this tool can have a tremendous benefit in terms of saving companies money by centralizing and standardizing many different things from documents, workflows, group work and more. The problem was that the tool was just too cumbersome and troublesome to work with. SP2010 aims to make leaps and bounds to solve many of those problems. SharePoint “14” (the code name) will finally provide some much needed and asked for features:
- Tight integration with Exchange 2010
- Ability to create, edit and collaborate on Office documents thru your browser
- O P E N A P I S!!!!!! And even a (real) Client Object Model!
- Deep support for developing with VS2010 (read here – NO MORE HAND ROLLING WEB PARTS AND XML)
- One-Click deployment
- Mapping image URLs to SharePoint environments
- Better mobile support!
SharePoint 2010 is still only in Beta so it will be very interesting to see what it finally RTM’s with but the outlook (pardon the pun) is really looking good. Here are some links that are worth scanning:
- Get Started Developing on SharePoint 2010
- What’s New in SharePoint Foundation 2010
- What’s New in SharePoint Server 2010
- Channel 9 on SharePoint 2010 Developer
Happy Coding!!
John Howell 