As part of SharePoint Server 2010, we have created a new set of features to help you collect, report, and analyze the usage and effectiveness of your SharePoint 2010 deployment – whether it’s used as an internal or external web portal, a collaboration tool or a document and records management repository.  These features are part of the Web Analytics capabilities of SharePoint 2010.

This blog post is the first of several that will give you more insight into the enhanced Web Analytics features that we have built into SharePoint 2010. This first post will provide an overview of the new Web Analytics features and we’ll take a deep dive in to specific scenarios in future posts.

Overview

Web Analytics Reports

In SharePoint 2010, we have improved the set of Web Analytics reports that are available out-of-the-box, which will provide insights into the behavior of users of your SharePoint sites.  There are three categories of reports that you will find:

• Traffic reports: These reports provide metrics such as:
1. How much traffic your site gets (Number of Page Views);
2. Who visits your sites (Top Visitors);
3. How visitors arrive at your site (Top Referrers);
4. Daily Unique Visitors, Top Destinations, Top Browsers, etc;
• Search reports: These reports give you insight into what users are searching for, for example:
1. How many times users searched (Number of Queries);
2. What were the most used search terms (Top Queries);
3. What queries have high failure rates (Failed Queries);
4. Best Bet Usage, Search keywords, etc;
• Inventory reports: These reports display key metrics regarding the inventory of your sites:
1. What is the total disk drive space user (Storage Usage);
2. How many sites exist (Number of Sites);
3. Top Site Product Versions, Top Site Languages, etc;

We aggregate these reports aggregated at the following levels:

1. Per web application in the farm
2. Per site collection
3. Per site
4. Per search service application

Out-of-the-box, these reports are visible to Administrators at each level.  For example, site-level reports are available to Site Administrators of those sites.  We have also added a new permission level, “View Web Analytics Data,” that will allow users to access these reports without having to give them Administrator privileges.

You can access Web Analytics reports by going to Site Actions -> Site Settings.  Under the Site Actions heading you will see two links, Site Web Analytics Reports and Site Collection Web Analytics Reports. 

When you click on either link, you are taken to an overview page that shows you key metrics for your site.  You can then drill down to other reports by clicking on them on the left navigation. You can also change the date range for the reports by clicking on the Analyze tab on the Ribbon.

Custom Web Analytics Reports

The out-of-the-box reports are useful to get a general understanding of what is happening on your sites.  However, we have made it easy for you to get a deeper level of analysis, or to simply create your own reports.  To get started, click on the Customize Report button under the Analyze tab in the Ribbon.  Clicking this button will export the data contained in this report to Excel.  Excel is a power analytics tools and makes it easy for non technical users to add your own charts, set specific filters, and combine data from multiple reports.  In addition, the data within Excel is refreshable, which means that, once you customize the report, it will always be up-to-date with the latest data.  To get more details on the great new features in Excel 2010 for building charts, reports and pivot tables, take a look at the Excel Team blog.

Web Analytics Workflows

Web Analytics Workflows is a powerful new feature set that enables you to get reports sent out either on a schedule or when specific conditions are met.  For example, you can set them up to receive an email every time the total number of pages views drop by 80% week over week.

To setup a Web Analytics Workflow, go to the Web Analytics report that you are interested in and click on Schedule Alerts or Reports on the Analyze tab in the Ribbon.

Clicking this button will guide you through a series of steps to create your Workflow.

Best Bets Suggestions

Best Bets allow Search Administrators to determine what the most relevant search result is for a given keyword. Up until now, Search Administrators had to look at different reports and data to determine which best bets needed to be added. That process is no longer necessary as SharePoint 2010 periodically sends out suggestions for new Best Bets using all the search metrics it has collected. Now, Search Administrators can simply look through each of the Best Bet suggestions and easily accept or reject them.

To access the Best Bet Suggestions, go to Site Actions, click on Site Collection Web Analytics Reports, and the click on Best Bets Suggestions on the left navigation.

Web Analytics Web Part

We have created a new web part, the Web Analytics Web Part, targeted at Site Managers. This new Web Part is an end-user facing Web Part that can be easily inserted into any page on your site.  It can be configured to display the ‘most viewed content’ or the ‘most frequent search queries’ in the site. The data in the Web Part is continuously refreshed as new content or new search queries become more popular.

To use this Web Part, go into the Edit mode of one of your Site Pages and click on any place you can add a Web Part.  Then, from the Insert tab on the Ribbon, click on Web Part.  Finally, click on the Content Rollup category and select the Web Analytics Web Part.

After you have inserted the Web Analytics Web Part, you can then configure it to display the data you are interested in.

Conclusion

Using the new Web Analytics features in SharePoint 2010, you will be able to get a deeper understanding of what users are doing, what they want from your site and how you can tailor the SharePoint experience to bets meet their needs.   Keep an eye out for future posts where we will delve deeper into each of the features mentioned above.

Hi everyone, I am Quentin Christensen and I work on document and records management functionality for SharePoint. Electronic discovery (commonly referred to as eDiscovery) is an area we are supporting with new set of capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010. In case you are not familiar with eDiscovery, it is the process of finding, preserving, analyzing and producing content in electronic formats as required by litigation or investigations. eDiscovery is an important concern for all of our customers and given that SharePoint has grown to be an integral part of collaboration, document, and records management for many organizations, we recognize the need to support the eDiscovery process for SharePoint content.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 included a hold feature that could be used for eDiscovery, but it was scoped to the Records Center site template. With SharePoint Server 2010 the eDiscovery capabilities have been greatly expanded to provide more functionality and the power to use these features across your entire SharePoint deployment.

In this post, I want to highlight three major improvements in SharePoint that support eDiscovery. You can:

• Manage holds and conduct eDiscovery searches on any site collection
• Use SharePoint Server Search or FAST Search for SharePoint out of box to search and process content
• Automatically copy eDiscovery search results to a separate repository for further analysis

Read on to learn how SharePoint Server 2010 can support your eDiscovery initiatives and provide you with the tools you need to manage holds, identify, and collect SharePoint content.

The eDiscovery Process

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model from EDRM (edrm.net) provides an overview of the different parts of the eDiscovery process:

SharePoint Sever 2010 addresses the Information Management, Identification, Preservation and Collection stages. While this blog post will focus mostly on the identification, preservation and collection components, SharePoint provides a rich Information Management platform for Collaboration, Social Computing, Document Management and Records Management.  This means that you can take a proactive approach to eDiscovery by putting a governance framework in place and using appropriate disposition policies to expire content. Managing content and deleting it when it is no longer needed will reduce the amount of content that must be indexed and searched, and collected for eDiscovery.  The result is that eDiscovery costs can be dramatically reduced, changing the problem from finding a needle in a hay stack to finding a needle in a hay bale. Ultimately, the key to achieving legal compliance for eDiscovery obligations is built upon a foundation of robust Information Management.

When an eDiscovery event occurs, such as a receipt of complaint, discovery, or notice of potential legal claim, the identification stage begins. Content that may be subject to eDiscovery must be identified and searches are conducted to find that content. That content needs to be preserved and at some point, the content will be collected.

The eDiscovery Features

Hold and eDiscovery

Hold and eDiscovery is a site level feature that can be activated on any site.

Activating this feature creates a new category in Site Settings that provides links to Holds and Hold Reports lists. There is also a page to discover and hold content that allows you to search for content and add it to a hold. Once the Hold and eDiscovery feature is activated you can create holds and add to hold any content in the site collection. By default only Site Collection administrators have access to the Hold and eDiscovery pages. To give other users permission, add them to the permissions list for the Hold Reports and Holds lists. This will also give access to the Discover and hold content page.

You can manually locate content in SharePoint and add it to a hold, or you can search for content and add the search results to a hold. With the Hold and eDiscovery feature you can create holds in the hold list and then manually add content to the relevant hold by clicking on Compliance Details from the drop down menu for individual items.

Then click on the link to Add/Remove from hold.

And you can select the relevant hold to add to or remove from.

By manually adding an item to hold you will block editing and deletion of that item until it is released from hold. You will notice that the document now has a lock icon showing that it cannot be edited or deleted.

Each night a report for each hold is generated by a timer job. If you need a hold report faster you can manually run the Hold Processing and Reporting timer job in Central Administration.

Search and Process

You can manually add items to hold on any site collection, which is great. But that doesn’t help you find the content you don’t already know about. What if you have a large amount of items you want to find and add to a hold? For that you can use the features on the Discover and hold content page, which is a settings page in Site Settings. From this page you can specify a search query and then preview the results. The configured search service (SharePoint Search Server or FAST Search for SharePoint) will automatically be used. You can then select the option to keep items on hold in place so they cannot be edited or deleted, or if you have configured a Content Organizer Send to location in Central Administration you can have content copied to another site and placed on hold. You may want to create a separate records center site for a particular hold to store all content related to that hold. The Content Organizer is a new SharePoint Server 2010 feature based on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Document Router with richer functionality to automatically classify content based on Content Type or metadata properties. Look for a future blog post covering the Content Organizer.

Holding content in place is recommended if you want to leave content in the location is was created with all the rich context that SharePoint provides, while blocking deletion and editing of content. Be aware that this will prevent users from modifying items. If you prefer users to continue editing documents, then use the copy to another location approach.

When searching and processing, the search will by default be scoped to the entire Site Collection and run with elevated permissions so all content can be discovered. The search can be scoped to specific sites and you can also preview search results before adding the results to a hold. Items can be placed on multiple holds and compliance details will show all of the holds that are applied to an item.

In summary, SharePoint Server 2010 contains key features that make it an essential aspect of your eDiscovery strategy. With the new SharePoint Server 2010 capabilities you can easily apply proper retention policies for all content and make it easier to discover content if an eDiscovery event occurs. eDiscovery often prescribes tight deadlines for production. SharePoint 2010 helps you find the right content and deliver it faster.

Quentin Christensen
Program Manager – Document and Records Management
Microsoft

As you can see from the last few posts, we are incredibly proud of the evolution of our ECM capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and in April, we are heading to the AIIM Expo in Philadelphia to give attendees the chance to try out SharePoint 2010 and hear directly from the people who built the product.  Starting on April 20th, we’ll open the doors on the SharePoint Experience Lab where you can learn about Office and SharePoint 2010, assisted by the ECM team from Redmond and some of our top field specialists.  The SharePoint Experience Lab will be in the Expo Hall where we will be joined by a number of our leading partners and best of all, if you register before the event, entry to the Expo Hall is ABSOLUTELY FREE!  That’s right, register now and you will get access to a wide range of SharePoint labs, supported by the team from Redmond.

In addition to the SharePoint Experience Lab, we are proud to support the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo.  The SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo consists of almost 30 sessions delivered by the SharePoint ECM Team, customers and leading industry analysts.  Entry to the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo is included with a conference pass that you can pick up for just $599 (UPDATE – Advanced registration has been extended.  Enter code A525G to receive a $50 discount).  Not a bad price to ask all the questions you ever wanted answered about SharePoint and get the inside scoop from senior product and program managers as well as Eric Swift, the General Manager of the SharePoint Marketing Group.

Here is an overview of the content being delivered by Microsoft speakers at the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo:

• Introducing SharePoint 2010
• ECM for the Masses: How SharePoint 2010 Delivers on the Promise
• SharePoint and Office: What’s New in 2010
• Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010
• Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010
• Growing SharePoint from Small Libraries to Large Scale Repositories & Massive Archives
• Visual Customization Overview: Theming & Branding For Any Site
• Using Enterprise Content Types & Managed Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010
• Using SharePoint Analytics and End User Feedback to Optimize the Content and Organization of your SharePoint Sites
• Document Management in SharePoint 2010
• Building Rich, Immersive Sites with Microsoft Tools &  Technologies
• Enterprise Search Overview
• Delivering BI to the Masses at Microsoft
• Building an Enterprise Knowledge Management Solution on SharePoint 2010
• Records Management Strategies in SharePoint 2010
• Better Together Collaboration with SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 & More!
• Managing and Sharing Digital Assets in SharePoint 2010
• If You Build It, They Will Come: Driving End User Adoption

With the launch of Office and SharePoint 2010 set for May 12th and our intent to RTM (Release to Manufacturing) this April 2010, there has never been a better time to hear from the team that built the product and get the knowledge you need to make SharePoint successful within your business.  Spring is coming to Philadelphia and with it comes SharePoint 2010 and the SharePoint ECM team.  We look forward to seeing you at the AIIM Expo.

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager – ECM and Compliance
Microsoft

Hello everyone! My name is Sangya Singh and I am a Program Manager on the SharePoint engineering team working on Web Content Management (WCM) features. We are very excited about the WCM capabilities that will be shipping in SharePoint 2010 and the possibilities they will open up for our customers to create rich WCM solutions. In this first post, I want to talk about the broad investments we have made in this release around WCM and share with you how we approached it from an engineering perspective.

Enabling different shades of WCM

Taking authoring to the next level

Making it easier to build richer sites

Richer publishing control and greater insight

Scalable platform to power your site

Enabling different shades of WCM

When most people hear WCM, they immediately think dot com, a public facing internet site.  A public facing site allows a company to drive brand awareness, deliver marketing campaigns, build community and share information about their products and services. The publishing process behind a public facing site is typically very structured to ensure a consistent look and feel, usage of approved branded assets and a more controlled approval process.  Public facing sites are just one use of WCM technology and most companies have far broader needs from a WCM platform.  If a public facing site is on one end of the spectrum then a solution like a Wiki is at the end other.  Wiki’s are community based and have lots of authors creating content in a very loosely controlled environment. Wiki authors have a lot more freedom on how their content is formatted and organized when compared with a public facing site.  There are many shades in-between these two scenarios requiring varying degrees of branding and governance so when we built the WCM features in SharePoint 2010 we set out to empower the business to easily adjust the dial between freedom and control from one site to the next.

Taking authoring to the next level

A modern WCM system has to meet many needs across a business but the number one goal has always be to empower the people who own and create content to easily publish content.  With a renewed focus on web analytics, search engine optimization, campaign management and personalization, many businesses and vendors have lost sight of the end user.  By empowering content creators, you can rapidly remove the friction between the business and IT ensuring that you can drive content to the right audience in a timely manner.  To empower the end user, you need to provide an intuitive user experience that helps employees author and publish content effectively without needing specialized technical skill.  Jim Masson discussed the notion of ECM for the masses in his blog ‘SharePoint 2010 Delivering on the promise’, giving insights in to how we think about empowering users and the list below outlines some of the key user experience enhancements that we made in SharePoint 2010:

Quick access to the tools and actions you use most often

The most notable visual change in SharePoint 2010 is the introduction of the “Ribbon” from the Office applications.  The Ribbon provides a consistent experience and makes it easy for users to discover the rich features in SharePoint.  What’s more, the Ribbon enables quick access to the most common functionality based on the specific task that you are working on.  So, let’s say you are authoring a page that requires you to add text, images and videos.  When you’re typing, the Ribbon will show you text formatting options like styles, fonts, bold, italics etc.  When you click on a video player web part you get options like changing the size of the media player, whether or not the video starts when the page loads or whether the video should loop once it finishes…

Text formatting options available when adding text

Media configuration options are displayed when Media web part is selected

One-click page creation

In SharePoint 2010, one-click page creation allows you to simply enter the page title then you can immediately start authoring the page. 

Unlike SharePoint 2007, authors can get into creating their page content by just specifying the page name.

Dynamically changing Page Layout

Page Layouts (templates) provide a way to apply a consistent look and feel to a page.  In SharePoint 2010, changing page layout is as easy as picking a layout from a gallery in the Ribbon while the author is editing the page.

The Page Layout ribbon drop-down is available to pick and choose from.

New and improved Rich Text Editor

The new and improved Rich Text Editor (RTE) provides a “Word-like” editing experience that most people take for granted in a non-browser world.  The RTE in SharePoint 2010 provides rich formatting of text, live preview of formatting options, easy embedding of images and videos directly into the RTE and drag and drop capability to place them exactly where you want. 

Easy to add rich media

SharePoint 2010 makes it easy for authors to select and add rich media content (like images, audio, video and Silverlight controls) to their pages.  Authors have quick access to Media, Video and Silverlight Web Parts that they can add to their pages.  We’ve also introduced a new experience for selecting rich media content that has features like getting to preview and play the video before you select it.

Support for a wider range of web browsers

With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010, we will be supporting Internet Explorer 7 & 8.0 as well as the latest versions of Firefox and Safari.  This allows users to use their browser of choice when working with SharePoint.

Making it easier to build richer sites

Many people still think of SharePoint as an intranet platform but with customers like Ferrari and AMD betting on our platform for their .com presence, you’re probably asking yourself, how can I use SharePoint to help me build a rich, immersive and accessible web site?  The following features would help with that question:

Rich media integration

Earlier I discussed the new web parts in SharePoint 2010 that allow you to add rich media to your pages. To support these web parts, we’ve developed a specialized Asset Library that is optimized for storing, managing and navigating large volumes of rich media including images, audio and video files. We’ve also made investments to ensure that key metadata is promoted from these assets when you upload them to the Asset Library.

The new Asset Library showcasing viewing of assets in thumbnail view and metadata driven navigation

A dialog showing information about an asset as the user’s mouse hovers over it in the Asset Library.

You can preview the video in the hover over dialog before you select the video.

To deliver rich media, we’ve included a customizable Silverlight media player that allows you to customize the ‘skin’ to meet your specific visual needs.

Silverlight based player for playing rich media in SharePoint

Dynamic content

If you want to quickly build landing pages or show dynamic content roll-ups, then you can easily use the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). If you have been developing web sites with SharePoint 2007, then you have no doubt used used this web part. In SharePoint 2010, we’ve made a lot of enhancements to the CQWP. These enhancements support content to content targeting where the query defined in the CQWP can now filter on metadata on the items being queried or a value passed to the page in the URL query string.  This rapidly enables scenarios where you need to show related data like services, product sheets, help topics or community content like blogs and wikis. The blog post on Introducing Document Management in 2010 discusses one such scenario with a CQWP. There are other improvements made where data view mapping can now be done via the CQWP tool pane UI.

Managed Metadata tagging

SharePoint 2010 introduces a powerful set of features around defining and managing taxonomies and then leveraging those “terms” to tag content in SharePoint.  Leveraging these managed metadata fields in web content enables scenarios around showing dynamic content (discussed above), driving dynamic navigation based on metadata and helps with search engine optimization.

Well-formed mark-up

We made investments in developing and testing against W3C WCAG 2.0 guidelines at the AA level and ensuring that the mark-up within our pages (e.g.  page layouts, master pages, content generated in the RTE) is well formed XHTML. This improves accessibility and cross-browser support for sites built on SharePoint.  In cases where authors have added content that does not contain well-formed mark-up, we offer a “Convert to XHTML” function in the Ribbon that scrubs the current page mark-up, converting it to well formed XHTML. 

Community building tools

The social computing investments in SharePoint 2010 enable scenarios where readers of your site can tag, rate and comment on site content. In addition, you can leverage SharePoint blogs and wikis within your site to foster community and user contributed content so you can easily incorporate social features in your web sites using SharePoint 2010.

Rating control shows the average rating in the form of 1 to 5 stars. And the mouse over tool tip shows the how the user rated the content.

Richer publishing control and greater insight

The publishing platform in SharePoint allows you to control what flexibility is available to authors, how sophisticated the approval process needs to be for content to go live, how the content should be organized in your site, how to orchestrate publishing in different parallel sites and whether to separate the authoring and staging environment from your live site.  We’ve also included tools to help you gain insight into what is going on with your site. 

Control over what authors can do

Depending on the needs of your site and authors, you can control the functionality available during content creation.  You can make all the text formatting options available or only allow the use of predefined markup styles that follow the consistent look and feel of your site while generating well-formed markup. You can give authors the freedom to insert any web part or have the specific, approved web parts available in the page layout.

Orchestrate publishing across different parallel sites

In SharePoint 2007, we introduced the Variations feature.  One application of this feature is to support multilingual publishing scenarios where you want to orchestrate publishing between your source site and other global sites that will translate content in to a different language.  We have introduced improvements in the translation pipeline to make it easy for someone working in a localized site to understand what has changed in the source site. Users will have 1-click access to a view of what has changed in the latest version of the source page so they can decide what they need to translate or if they need to translate anything at all.

Ribbon action available to the authors on the target sites, to view what changed on the latest version of the page sent by the source site.

We’ve also made improvements around reliability and server citizenship. We’ve moved Variation operations to timer jobs.  We support pause and resume during timer service recycles to improve the reliability of long-running operations in large deployments. We give a lot more control to IT on when the expensive process of creating hierarchies should happen.    It is also worth noting that the feature set in Variations is complementary to a set of new investments in SharePoint 2010 around Multi-language User Interface (MUI).  MUI is the technology that helps SharePoint present all application UI in the preferred language of the user of the site.  The combination of Variations and MUI investments provides a great story for managing the translation of your content and managing the display of the SharePoint UI giving a unified experience in multilingual sites.

Deploying content from authoring/staging environment to the live environment

The Content Deployment feature was added in SharePoint 2007 to address requirements for companies hosting their internet sites on SharePoint and wanting a separate environments for authors to modify and review content before it was published to the public facing farm.  In SharePoint 2010, we have made significant investments to improve the reliability of the Content Deployment feature.  In addition, we’ve made a lot of these reliability improvements available to SharePoint 2007 customers through cumulative updates.  Additionally, we’ve made changes to the platform to take advantage of database snapshots to better improve scenarios where authoring on site is going on while the Content Deployment job is running. You can take advantage of this feature if you have SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Enterprise edition. We also provide better logging to get provide insight into Content Deployment jobs.

Publishing workflows

Depending on the type of WCM deployment you have, you can decide how simple or sophisticated your publishing approval process needs to be. You can decide that you don’t need any approval process in place or use simple out-of-box parallel or serial approval workflows or customize the out-of box workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010 to model your business process. We now enable business users to model their workflow in Microsoft Visio 2010 which can then be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010.  Another great advantage of building in Visio is that SharePoint uses a new feature, Visio Services to deliver workflow visualization, showing exactly where in the process the workflow is currently executing.  We’ve also made improvements in this release where you can reuse the workflow you have created and apply to content types and site templates. 

Web Analytics

An important part of any site is understanding what is going on with the content, users and the servers powering the site. SharePoint 2010 provides a range of new Web Analytics capabilities that monitor different aspects of site usage.  In addition to the out of box reports, you can subscribe to alerts to monitor changes on key metrics.  Beyond traffic insight, there is support for search insight around search queries, popular terms and queries that are succeeding or failing.  It also recommends new best bets for the search system by watching what links people are clicking on the search result page so you can promote these to the top of the page.

A report showing information over time on number of page views on the site.               

Server Health Monitoring

SharePoint 2010 has made some big investments in logging infrastructure from the analytic side that will help you monitor the performance of your SharePoint deployment.  You can now easily find the slowest pages (in terms of rendering) on your site.  So in case you have customization where you have one or more Content Query Web Parts making expensive queries and forgot to turn on caching then we’ll help you find that page.  Since sites are highly customized with custom web parts and field controls, we’ve introduced the Developer Dashboard feature that allows a developer investigating why a certain page renders slowly to see at a page level which queries went to SQL backend and how long they took. Introduction of Sandboxed solutions allows site administrators to upload custom code that runs in its own sandbox in a way that it can be monitored and throttled so it doesn’t impact the quality of service to other users on the farm.

Scalable platform to power your site

There are a number of investments made in the platform to ensure continued performance and scalability as your site grows.

Large Pages Library and the Content Organizer

We have made improvements in SharePoint 2010 to support thousands of pages in a given pages library but more importantly, we’ve introduced the ability to organize pages in folders with a Pages Library.  A new feature called Content Organizer can be leveraged to better organize your web content by setting rules that will decide where page should go.  This allows the authors to concentrate on authoring the content and the Content Organizer uses rules to drive the page to the right location.  With the investment in large lists, SharePoint 2010 also gives IT the ability to govern how these items are accessed by introducing resource throttling to be able to limit the number of items accessed in a view or a CQWP as an example.

Optimization of the Content Query Web Part

As mentioned earlier, the CQWP can show dynamic content based on a query.  In this release we have made query optimizations that leverage indices available on the list that CQWP queries.

Support for streaming rich media

We’ve put a lot plumbing into the product to ensure that the end-user experience of viewing and streaming rich media on your site is smooth and the impact on your network and SQL backend is minimized.  The BLOB cache on the web front ends (WFE) has been optimized to read content from SQL in small chunks and start sending the file to the client immediately so the user doesn’t have to wait for the whole file to download.  The BLOB cache can also serve requests for parts of the file to the client.  So if the user wants to skip to the last chapter in the video and the entire file hasn’t been downloaded yet, the BLOB cache can serve that part of the video immediately.

I hope this post gives you a good introduction to the new and improved WCM capabilities in SharePoint 2010 that allow you to deliver great web sites with rich media, dynamic content and an intuitive user experience for content authors. We look forward to discussing these areas in depth with you in upcoming blog posts and would love to hear your feedback on the investments we’ve made in SharePoint 2010.

Thanks for reading. 

Sangya Singh

Lead Program Manager