Microsoft has announced details of its much anticipated next release of SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, which provides improvements in scalability, content management functionality and governance. Application developers, IT planners and enterprise architects will want to assess the changes and plan their strategy for adoption or migration.

• SharePoint 2010 remains a horizontal content management offering. Microsoft does not appear to be targeting vertical applications or transactional (fixed) content management with this release, but rather more collaborative processes and dynamic content applications.
• This release promises improved scalability and better support for broad enterprise deployments.
• Enterprises will be better able to govern their SharePoint deployments if new features, such as policy-based information management, prove robust and effective.
• SharePoint 2010 provides a more intuitive user interface. The range of information workers who can consume and use content management therefore continues to increase, blurring more completely the distinction between user and administrator.

• Existing SharePoint (Windows SharePoint Services [WSS] or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server [MOSS] 2007) customers should plan for eventual migration to SharePoint 2010, although the time frame will vary based on enterprise needs and risk aversion.
• Unless enterprises have pressing needs, Gartner recommends waiting until the first service pack for SharePoint 2010 is released.
• Organizations looking to SharePoint to support large volumes of static content or transactional processes will find their needs better met through partner-built solutions extending SharePoint or competing enterprise content management (ECM) offerings.
• Understand the broader investments you may need to make for SharePoint 2010, as it will be available only with a 64-bit architecture and will require other Microsoft components.
• Test third-party applications/Web Parts that may need to be integrated for compatibility.

Microsoft's SharePoint family has been a widely successful offering with organizations of all sizes and across all industries. Gartner inquiry and survey data indicates that approximately 50% of organizations, both large and small, have piloted or deployed WSS or MOSS 2007 as key elements of their overall information infrastructures. By delivering a broad set of functionality using a horizontal infrastructure approach, as opposed to the traditional application approach, Microsoft has changed the way organizations think about content management and collaboration — they are no longer distinct arenas. Yet, SharePoint has not been without its challenges. Through client interactions, Gartner has collected a great deal of information about the 2007 version's limitations in supporting more advanced ECM requirements. These include server replication issues, inability to support compound documents, and limited process management capabilities. SharePoint is currently best used for supporting ad hoc content management needs and collaborative content processes. (Social software issues may present additional challenges.)

Though MOSS 2007's "sweet spot" is as a portal and also for document-centric collaboration and basic content management, many organizations have pushed the boundaries with it and view it as a strategic platform on which they want to build composite content applications (see Note 1). Thus, the most often asked question from Gartner clients has been: "When will SharePoint be a full ECM system?" As Microsoft prepares to ship this fourth iteration of SharePoint, IT professionals and business leaders want to know: "Has Microsoft finally got it right?" In many ways, the answer is "Yes." Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (expected release 1H10) will offer significant improvements in many areas that have been problematic in MOSS 2007 and it will close the gap with its ECM competitors, particularly with regard to document and records management, metadata management and policy-based governance. Some ECM vendors will increasingly find themselves competing against, rather than coexisting with, SharePoint 2010.

With this release, Microsoft has focused on making SharePoint 2010 both enterprise- and people-ready. It addresses interrelated capabilities for search, social computing and ECM. However, it still does not meet some high-end needs, such as synchronization between server farms, out-of-the-box integration with other leading content management systems, and a clearly defined flexible repository and storage strategy other than SQL. Users needing these functions will require third-party tools from vendors such as Infonic, Syntergy, BlueThread Technologies, Systemware and StorSimple.

From the ECM perspective, with SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has focused on features that make content management more consumable by knowledge workers. SharePoint 2010 will provide deeper integration with Microsoft Office, leveraging the consistent use of the contextual "ribbon" interface. There is deeper integration with the Exchange 2010 messaging platform, including automatic e-mail routing, and users have the ability to tag e-mail within Outlook. In addition, Exchange 2010 can "journal" content across to SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 provides a greatly improved offline experience through the optional SharePoint Workspace rich client (formerly Groove). This allows you to download content, line-of-business data, InfoPath forms and site material to your computer and resynchronize it when reconnected and upload any changes. We expect this — as well as efforts at building strong mobile-device interfaces to SharePoint — to be welcome enhancements, as the mobile and disconnected user states are both common, and access to information is still important.

SharePoint 2010 still lacks full compound document capabilities, but the document sets concept represents a step toward both compound documents and document assembly. In addition, the rudiments of document output management are surfacing in SharePoint 2010 via a server process, called Word Services, that enables rendering and printing of documents and exporting them to different file formats.

One issue that has been problematic in the MOSS 2007 version is list, library, site collection and document size limits on what can be efficiently stored (see details at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx). SharePoint 2010 has expanded support for large collections of documents. According to Microsoft, SharePoint 2010 will accommodate tens of millions of items in a single library and up to a million items in a folder. This should make it easier to store large volumes of content and simplify the information architecture, as architects won't run into these constraints as often.

Though MOSS 2007 supports basic records management through the Records Center, records management has been one of its relatively weaker capabilities overall. Gartner believes that SharePoint 2010 will provide somewhat more comprehensive records management functionality. But we do not believe that it will be certified for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 records management standard or equivalent standards in other regions, such as DOMEA and MoReq2 (see www.moreq2.eu/other-specifications). Microsoft suggests that users implement partner-built extensions for DoD-certified records management. Among the new features are in-place records management, multistage disposition and retention policies that span SharePoint instances. There will also be the ability to declare blogs, wikis and Web content as records and to place legal holds on these content types. This broader support for a range of content types means that records can now be more easily declared in the context of a collaborative process.

Microsoft will more tightly integrate its FAST search technology with SharePoint in the Office 2010 release. The most significant search enhancements are:

• Social search.
• Visual best bets.
• Thumbnails and previews.
• User-specific relevance.
• Extreme scale (volume, queries per second and index freshness).

Key improvements in this area are the ability to offer more flexible content types and to define taxonomies at the enterprise level and allow them to be consumed as service applications across many site collections. Content types, which define retention policies and metadata schemas, can now be defined at the enterprise level, as opposed to at the site level as in MOSS 2007. This ensures consistency of content types. Out of the box, it provides base types that can be modified by each enterprise. SharePoint 2010 also supports folksonomies and taxonomies.

MOSS 2007 has been successful in the intranet domain, where the combination of its portal, Web 2.0, collaboration and document management capabilities and ease of use is very compelling for many companies. When it comes to externally facing websites, SharePoint has lacked the robustness and maturity required by many customers and offered by competitors. Though Microsoft has gained more customers who are using the Web content management (WCM) capabilities of MOSS 2007 for large public websites, Gartner has still not seen Microsoft make significant enhancements to the WCM functionality. These shortcomings would be remedied were Microsoft to enhance areas such as ease of content reuse, multisite management, workflow and enterprise-level federation capabilities, including replication and multifarm synchronization.

SharePoint 2010 will support native streaming of media files and it ships with a Silverlight media player Web Part for playback. For digital asset management, you can stream video natively from SharePoint with buffering, bit throttling and an integrated media player. While stopping well short of full digital asset management capabilities, the new version includes enhanced support for posting, viewing, rating and editing video podcast content natively from within SharePoint.

Areas in which we expect further enhancement from Microsoft are compliance and accessibility, where the ability to quickly scan pages for Section 508 compliance in the U.S. and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in Europe should be an out-of-the-box set of capabilities.

For very simple page construction, using the online editing features that can be accessed through the browser and SharePoint Workspace, users can edit Web pages, blogs and wikis without having to go to the full Office applications as often.

For current 2007 implementations, we urge enterprises to avoid the use of customizations and extensions as much as possible. During the 2003 to 2007 migration wave, the organizations that experienced the greatest difficulties were those that had done significant customizations to their older environment. Custom master pages and custom site definitions frequently cause problems during migrations. Use one of the many migration tools available, such as the Microsoft Upgrade Checker which provides a checklist of actions and considerations for your deployment as you upgrade. Of course, when you consider migration, there will always be a labor cost element, even when using a tool. Ensure you do an inventory of sites and content, and assess whether they merit migration. At migration time, it is common to find that 50% or more of the content is old, not useful or no longer necessary for the business. Migrating such unneeded content serves only to weigh down the data structures and backup abilities of your fresh SharePoint environment. Minimally, review the approaches Microsoft outlines at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263447%28office.14%29.aspx. Also look at tools from AvePoint, MetaVis Technologies, Metalogix Software, Quest Software, Tzunami and Vamosa.

Because SharePoint 2010 has a 64-bit architecture and requires a 64-bit version of Windows Server and SQL Server, enterprises will want to factor in budget for required hardware, as well as related software, if this investment hasn't yet occurred.

Microsoft is also updating its SharePoint Online and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) offerings. This update is expected later in 2010. Gartner believes that Microsoft is making substantial improvements in this area — the existing multitenant version has functionality more similar to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 rather than MOSS, and many clients are hoping for improvements here. Gartner is collecting details and beta user feedback on this updated version and will address this in future 2010 research.