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

Hi everyone. It’s Adam here again – this time I want to talk to you today about another key area of the content management world: Document Management (DM). Over the next few months, you’ll be hearing from several members of the engineering team about new DM features that help you get the most value out of your document corpus. We’ll also discuss how key early adopters of SharePoint 2010 used new DM features to solve the toughest information governance challenges.

Today, though, I’d like to spend time talking about what the team has learned about the document management space since SharePoint 2007 and take you on a journey through the key tenets that guided our DM vision this release.

Recap: Document Management in SharePoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 was the first release where SharePoint really broke out of its collaboration role and enabled customers to apply structure and management to their document libraries. A lot of the key DM infrastructure was established in that release: Check in/Check Out, Major/Minor Versioning, Per-Item Permissions, Content Types, Workflows, and the Recycle Bin are just a few examples. Of course, all of these features tightly integrated with the Office client applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to make it simple for end users to interact with the document repository (a core design tenet that carries through in 2010).

Features like these enabled customers to start creating high-value knowledge repositories on SharePoint 2007.

For 2010, we looked to build off of 2007’s gigantic success, and we rallied our designs around three key ideas:

Tenet #1: Manage the unmanaged

As we looked at how our customers were starting to use the 2007 system’s DM features, we noticed an interesting trend: These features were not just part of managed document repository deployments. Indeed, the traditional DM features were getting heavy usage in average collaborative team sites as well. Customers were using them to apply policy and structure as well as gather insights from what otherwise would have been fairly unmanaged places. SharePoint was being using to pull more and more typically unstructured silos into the ECM world.

This is a key insight that really drove our investments in SharePoint 2010. For instance, one of our key new features in SharePoint 2010 is the notion of a Document Set. You can think of a document set as a “folder on steroids.” It allows you to group related documents together so that they share metadata and have a common homepage, workflows, and archival process:

The Welcome Page of a document set is a customizable page that allows users to discover the content in the set, view and sync metadata between items in the set, and manage the set.

When it came time to design this feature, we knew people would want to use it to manage very structured and rigid official processes (e.g. a pharmaceutical company submitting forms to a regulatory agency). But equally important to us was that the feature can be used in a lightweight team site to manage most processes that requires multiple documents to be bound together (e.g. a team that just needs to put together a pitch book/sales proposal that includes a PowerPoint deck, a spreadsheet of costs, and a document that describes the sales pitch).

Enabling the document set feature to be used informally and easily is one way we are expanding the value of ECM in the minds of SharePoint end users.

Tenet #2: Social computing and enterprise metadata are game changers.

As we started to design out the DM feature set for this release, we quickly realized the power of metadata – both structured taxonomies as well as lightweight folksonomies (keywords) – as transformative forces in the document management space. A SharePoint 2010 document repository would need to take full advantage of both concepts.

There are two key principles that enable SharePoint 2010 users to take advantage of metadata. First is on the tagging side: it’s easy for a site to use enterprise wide content types and taxonomies and it’s also simple for a user to tag with them.

SharePoint 2010 offers consistent management of metadata that any SharePoint site can hook in to with virtually no effort. This allows the entire enterprise to be talking the same language. Tangibly, you can do things such as define the list of products you sell once and have that data available in any SharePoint site.

Note how the type-ahead functionality makes it easy for a user to pick a value from this folksonomy. Also note how the West Coast tag was automatically filled out for the user because it was set as the default value for all documents in this library.

The second key principle is how SharePoint takes advantage of these tags. For instance, a SharePoint 2010 document library can be configured to use metadata as a primary navigation pivot. You can think of metadata based navigation as a virtual folder structure that can be used to filter the items in the library:

Instead of navigating by traditional folders, a user filtered the library to the virtual folder that contains just sales materials about Contoso’s tent products.

It’s a virtuous cycle here: Easy metadata entry allows items to be tagged, which can drive navigation. And because users need the metadata to navigate the repository, this incentivizes them to tag the items!

Tenant #3: The browser as a powerful document management application.

SharePoint has always been used for many scenarios, but perhaps it’s known best for two things:

· A best of breed tool for creating web pages and sites

· A place to store, manage, and collaborate on documents

SharePoint 2010 makes a big bet that creating a knowledge management repository requires the merger of both of these worlds. The browser is increasingly becoming the key technology for information workers – both inside the corporate firewall and on the consumer front. Sure, people will always want to download documents to take with them – but they also want to use the browser to interact with the document and see a wealth of context about the document (e.g. metadata, related documents, wiki pages about the document’s topic).

It’s time for the industry to expect any document management system to also be great at creating pages or wikis that add context to the documents’ content. And any system that doesn’t is going to start looking antiquated.

SharePoint 2010 delivers on this vision in a few different ways. First, if you’ve installed the Office Web Apps (licensed as part of the Office 2010 suite), the default click for a document library can be configured to load Office documents in the browser:

Without ever leaving the browser, users can quickly view Office documents stored in SharePoint.

Second, we spent a lot of time this release thinking about how the web content management features can be used in document repositories. For instance, the ever popular Content Query web part can be used to roll up all the documents related to a particular topic:

A content steward might create a page about a particular topic (e.g. a new product). This page includes text about the product, marketing pictures, as well as roll ups of all the documents tagged with the product.

This vision allows you to combine two very powerful aspects of SharePoint into one solution to your organization’s knowledge discovery problem. It’s a merger of an enterprise wiki and a traditional enterprise document repository.

Wrapping up: A lot more to come!

I hope this post gives some context on where we are going with document management in SharePoint 2010 and beyond. Feature wise, we really only hit a few of the many DM features that make up SharePoint 2010 – stay tuned for future posts as we deep dive into a lot more! And feel free to leave comments about what you’d like us to blog about (especially if you’ve downloaded the Beta and given SharePoint 2010 a test drive already!)

Thanks for reading.

Adam Harmetz

Lead Program Manager, Document and Records Management

Hi everyone.  My name is Adam Harmetz and I work on the engineering team responsible for the SharePoint document and records management vision and features.  Many of you might remember me from the SharePoint 2007 recman blog.  The recman blog was a great way for the team to connect with records managers, IT professionals, and information architects and we’ll be continuing that discussion for the SharePoint 2010 compliance features via the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog.

I think it makes sense to combine records management with other facets of ECM into one central blog.  After all, as Jim discussed, records management is a key component of our ECM strategy.  The notion that everyone should participate in ECM processes really served as a guiding principle to help expand the scope of records management in SharePoint 2010.  And for all you records managers out there, I think you’ll benefit greatly from learning about the other facets of ECM along the way.

To kick off the discussion, here are three key things you need to know about records management in SharePoint 2010.

The Records Center – A Place for Hierarchy, Driven By Metadata 

The Records Center was introduced in 2007 as a SharePoint site that served as a conventional records archive.   Content from all over the enterprise can be submitted to a Records Center and then routed to the appropriate place where it picks up the right permissions and policies, such as expiration and auditing.
For SharePoint 2010, we know it’s important to continue to invest here and add even more “traditional” archive features.   When looking at the broad swath of features we had to choose from, our goals here really focused on providing features that allow you to extract the most value out of an archive and find the data you need.  For instance, here are a few of the new features in a SharePoint 2010 Records Center:

• Document ID: Every document can be assigned a unique identifier, which stays with the document even when it’s archived.  This allows records to be easily referenced by an ID no matter where the document moves.


• Multi-Stage Retention: Retention policies can have multiple stages, allowing you to specify the entire document lifecycle as one policy (e.g. review Contracts every year, and delete after 7 years)


• Per-Item Audit Reports: You can generate a customized audit report about an individual record.


• Hierarchal File Plans: You can create deep, hierarchal folder structures and manage retention at each folder in the hierarchy (or inherit from parent folders).


• File Plan Report: You can generate status reports showing the number of items in each stage of the file plan, along with a rollup of the retention policies on each node in the plan.

Here’s the home page of the Records Center in SharePoint 2010 for a fictional government agency, the Joint Task Force.  Notice that the home page is a place for records managers to educate the organization on compliance policy, as well as a place to look up a record by its document identifier.

In addition to adding these traditional records management features to our archive, as product designers we made a big bet on the power of metadata to dive 21st century electronic records management.  This manifests itself in several ways in the SharePoint archive:

• Taxonomy and Centralized Content Types:  The archive will be a consumer of enterprise-wide taxonomies and content types, ensuring consistency and context transfer between the collaborative spaces and the archive.  We’ll be talking a lot more about our 2010 taxonomy investments in future posts.


• Content Organizer: The records router can use metadata to route incoming documents to the right place in the hierarchical file plan.  For instance, it enables you to automatically enforce rules on content that is submitted, like “If a Purchase Agreement is tagged with Project Alpha, send to the Alpha Contracts subfolder and apply that’s folder retention policy to the item.”


• Virtual Folders: The file plan is a great way to manage a repository but often time isn’t what you want to use to navigate and find the content you are looking for.  The SharePoint 2010 Records Center makes use of a new feature called metadata based navigation, which allows you to expose key metadata as virtual folders:

Notice that end users discover content in this Records Center by navigating virtual folders based upon metadata properties on the records.

This bet on metadata is all about empowering the end user, thus increasing the chance of successful adoption of the RM system.  Instead of choosing a complicated node in a file plan, submitters just fill out a few pieces of useful metadata and they’ll use that metadata when they need to find the content again.

In Place Records Management – Injecting Records Management in the Content Creation Experience

With just about every customer engagement my team is involved in, we hear the same message again and again: records management doesn’t start (or stop!) in the archive.  Content isn’t created there and it sure doesn’t live there for the most interesting parts of its life.

We’ve made a huge effort in 2010 to enable you to do effective records management in collaborative spaces.  Auditing, Retention, Expiration, Reporting, Records Workflows, eDiscovery, Legal Hold and Recordization are all features you can use in collaborative space as you are striking a balance between SharePoint’s value to end users and the need for information governance.

Holding all of this together is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 called In Place Records Management.  This allows certain SharePoint documents (or blogs, wikis, web pages, and list items) to be declared records.  The system can prevent such records from being deleted or edited, if necessary by your organization’s definition of what a record is:

Note that some of the documents have locks, implying to the user that they are dealing with records.  When selecting a record, the UI for editing and deleting the item is disabled.

This recordization process can be done either manually, as part of a larger process in a workflow, or as a scheduled part of a document’s retention (e.g. after 2 years).  The key here is that, when declared a record, the content doesn’t move to an archive – it stays where it is so the end users can still find and interact with the content.

Once declared, the system knows about an item’s record status, so you can do things such as create different retention policies for records or use record state when defining workflows in SharePoint Designer.  We also enable a programmability model so you can perform custom processes and policies upon recordization to meet specialized compliance needs.

Is In Place Records a replacement for a traditional archive?  The answer is, of course, sometimes – we’ll find some customers who want to use an in place approach exclusively, some who will want the traditional hierarchy and centralization that an archive brings, and many who will want both.  It’ll be something we’ll talk about a lot on this blog, and our documentation has already started discussing the pros and cons of both approaches.

Scale: We’re Talking Big

With electronic information growing at a crazy pace and businesses spending billions on eDiscovery every year, records managers have enough to keep them up at night.  The scale of their records/content management system shouldn’t be another worry.

As the records management engineering team, we take this burden very seriously and a large part of our effort this release has been spent adding features to make it easier to scale to massive archives.  Features such as Remote Blob Storage, database query optimizations, internal timer job processing improvements, new database indexing strategies and other engineering initiatives enable us to make a great leap forward this release and allow our customers to have:

• Tens of millions of records in a single Records Center


• Hundreds of millions of records in a distributed archive: We’ll talk in more detail in future posts, but many of the features mentioned above light up to allow many Record Centers to bind together to act as one logical repository.

With our partners on the SharePoint blog, we are looking forward to showing more details on the new scale targets and performance profiles for deployments at this scale over the coming months.

Wrapping Up

It’s been a lot of hard work for the team around here to deliver on this vision for 21st century records management.  When combined with the integrated e-mail archiving, retention, and discovery capabilities of Exchange 2010, I think you’ll see the 2010 wave as a breakout release for Microsoft’s records management strategy.

The team here is proud of the work here and eager to talk about it and hear from everyone – feel free to leave suggestions on future blog post ideas in the comments!

Thanks for reading,
Adam Harmetz
Lead Program Manager

P.S. If you are hungry for even for information on SharePoint 2010 records management, check out an interview I did on Don Lueder’s blog.

My name is Jim Masson, and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Enterprise Content Management team within SharePoint. My team is part of the engineering team, and is responsible for designing the features around content management, including managing documents, web content, rich media assets, records, and a new service for managing shared content types and taxonomy.

With the coming launch of SharePoint 2010, this seemed like a good time to ramp up the ECM team blog, and start a conversation about the SharePoint 2010 release. In the lead up to the offical launch of the product and beyond, various members of the team will be posting details about the major feature areas and features within ECM in SharePoint 2010, including design overviews, walkthroughs, best practices, and eventually interesting case studies. I hope you will subscribe and participate with us in the conversation

ECM For the Masses

When speaking with customers about the content management features in SharePoint 2010, we often refer to the release as being about ECM for the Masses.  I wanted to take this first post to outline a little bit about our approach to designing and building SharePoint 2010, and how that has helped us deliver on that vision.

• Enterprise Ready – This is all about ensuring that SharePoint more easily scales to the amount of content the largest Enterprises deal with and delivers consistently high performance and reliability at any scale. In addition we provide the feature depth, customizability and extensibility that Enterprises need to support the full breadth of business scenarios around content.


• Easy to Use – Our focus here is on 2 audiences. First, the features must be Easy for the Information Worker, with best-in-class usability, providing supreme user acceptance and speeding deployment and adoption. Second, the product must also be Easy for IT, providing great functionality OOB that is fast to deploy and easy to manage at the Enterprise, Divisional, Team and Workgroup levels.


• Everyone Participates – This is all about ensuring that Everyone in the organization has access to and benefits from the functionality offered by the ECM features – not just a few specialists who have been specially trained, or for whom the organization can justify a high per seat price. This also means that the capabilities can be adjusted to suit the needs of everyone in the organization; from minimal interaction to highly structured and complex workflows – everyone sees exactly as much as they need.

It is my hope that, as we go through the features over the next several months that you will see the impact of those pillars on the product, and how they have helped us to deliver ECM for the masses.