SharePoint 2010 is not designed to serve as a communication platform, but has more than its predecessors the capabilities of doing so. Every user can set up a personal blog or participate in workspace blogs. A blog is a set of related webparts which, besides the blog posts, includes blog content management (“blog tools”), a blog description (“about this blog”), categories, archives and links. When creating a blog post, users can assign the post to a category but the concept of categories cannot make up for the lack of tagging for individual blog posts. On the positive side SharePoint blogs have a tight Office 2007 integration which allows for easy content creation. Equally to blogs, forums can be added to any workspace. Due to the fact that they are based on SharePoints excellent list infrastructure, the layout of discussion threads can be extensively customized by creating different “views”. Furthermore users can comment by leaving a remark on a “note-board” which is attached to every newly created page.

The networking capabilities of MOSS 2007 are very lightweight and have been significantly improved for SharePoint 2010. The standard profile features picture, contact information and free-text self description are now complemented by a user activity stream, a profile guestbook (“the board”), an organizational chart (reporting hierarchy) and user content references (“sharing center” linking to documents, pictures, blog). Other employees can be manually added to the colleagues list and assigned to specific groups or synchronized with Outlook. The SharePoint 2010 network activity stream is called “colleague tracker” and allows following the actions of co-workers in a configurable set of selected activities (e.g. updates of tags, blog posts, documents, status). Besides customizable visibility levels of profile information (everyone, colleagues, team, manager, me), the status updates feature is very useful because users can keep colleagues informed choosing one of three standard messages (in/out of office, at home) or type in their particular status by hand.

In comparison to other social software products, SharePoint is king in Project Management. Even if very advanced Project Management needs integration with Microsoft Project Server, SharePoint itself is exceeding standard (social software) requirements. The basic support SharePoint provides for Project Management are flexibly configurable workspaces and excellent document collaboration support. In addition, good workflow management, detailed task assignment (tracking) and basic calendaring functionality are available. Already advanced is the sites “Projects” template which creates a project tracking database and enables users to track multiple projects within one interface. The integration with Outlook is not particularly good, but at least task lists can be connected to the user’s local groupware client.

At first, Microsoft will release Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as an on-premise solution, but is expected to add SharePoint 2010 to their set of online services soon after. SharePoint 2010 requires 64 bit compatible hardware and operating systems and relies on other Microsoft infrastructure like Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which have to be deployed in their 64bit versions too. SharePoint 2010 natively supports Mozilla Firefox 3.0 but for Internet Explorer use, version 7 or higher is required. A complete collaboration solution needs, besides Microsoft Office 2007, additional Microsoft products like the Office Communications Server (IM/Presence), Live Meeting (desktop sharing), Exchange Server (mail integration) and Project Server. Mobile access to SharePoint 2010 is possible with Windows Mobile and the mobile view of SharePoint pages can be edited on the platform. SharePoint 2010 is broadly localized in more than 30 languages.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 works best with Microsoft’s Active Directory but the .NET Framework allows for other LDAP and Single Sign On (SSO) solutions. Security and access control management is excellent due to fine grained permission settings for groups and individual users down to the page or element level. In addition to a good life-cycle management, SharePoint 2010 provides snapshot backup and recovery, policies for records and archiving and granular recovery at item level. Repository services with document check in/out and versioning are well implemented and preset workflows (approval, collect feedback, group approval, translation management, issue tracking) help to coordinate collaboration on documents.

Although not famous for their direct support, Microsoft can point to a huge global partner channel of certified consultants, trainers and integrators. Due to the complexity of SharePoint 2010, it is recommended to closely work together with a Microsoft Partner who has hands on experience with SharePoint deployments in general and testing experience with SharePoint 2010 in particular. Be aware that social software expertise is rare among traditional SharePoint implementers. While Microsoft has enhanced their documentation and developer community support, but still information is distributed among various websites (e.g. TechNet, msdn). The release of SharePoint 2010 includes the chance of setting up an entirely new central platform for SharePoint documentation and knowledge exchange.