SharePoint 2010 - New Features

SharePoint 2010-New Features

This article explores the new features of SharePoint 2010. Some of the new features of SharePoint 2010 are:

• Ribbon UI
• Status Bar
• Dialogs
• Branding and Theming
• Multilingual User Interfaces
• Inline Editing
• Developer Dashboard
• Silverlight Web Part
• Service Applications
  

For exploring the features please open the SharePoint 2010 default web application.

Eg: http://yourmachinename/

Ribbon UI
The Ribbon User Interface can be considered to be a major UI change in SharePoint 2010. It makes it similar to the Microsoft Office family of products. The advantages are user friendliness, easier access, categorized menus etc.

Opening a list shows the above Ribbon UI.

Status Bar
SharePoint 2010 provides a Status Bar which is below the Ribbon UI. It is not the Browser status bar. The Status Bar is configurable through pages.

Inline Editing
SharePoint 2010 allows the List items to be edited inline. This is without the use of an additional dialog with Ok/Cancel buttons. For enabling this we have to use the Modify View option in List Settings and choose Inline Editing enable checkbox.

New Dialogs
The dialogs are enhanced in SharePoint 2010. Some of the examples are given below.

New List and Library Dialog, Status Dialog





Branding and Theming
In SharePoint a new theme engine is included. This allows the users to create a theme from PowerPoint and use it inside SharePoint 2010.
The existing themes can be found in the Theme Gallary. (Site Actions > Site Settings > Themes)



You can change the Site theme anytime using the Site Settings > Look and Feel > Site theme option.



Silverlight Web Part
The new Silverlight web part has been added to SharePoint 2010. This allows us to embed Silverlight applicatons inside the web pages. You can access this from the Add Web Part screen.



Developer Dashboard
The developer dashboard is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 which can be used for debugging and tracing purposes. It provides the performance related information to the developers. It is by default turned off and can be enabled by using PowerShell or StsAdm tool.

Service Applications
In the older version SharePoint 2007 there exists Shared Services Providers (SSP). This feature no longer exists in the SharePoint 2010 version and only Service Applications exists. The service applications like Search, Excel Services are unboxed and run independently.

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557323.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2009/10/20/sharepoint-2010-spc09-ssp-is-dead-long-live-service-applications.aspx

Summary
In this article we have explored the new features of SharePoint 2010.