Some nice SharePoint features, you just need Office 2010

SharePoint 2010 is well established as a powerful platform for enabling (social) collaboration, portals and enterprise content management. As always, you get the most of this platform when you use Microsoft Office. Although, SharePoint 2010 does offer the new Office Web Applications.

SharePoint and Office work together nicely, even if you don’t have Office 2010 (yet). But there are some features which work best (or only!) if you use Office 2010 with the Office Web Application service.

Some nice ones:

PowerPoint broadcast

In the good old days, when you needed to share a presentation with some people who weren’t in the same room, you probably needed something like Office Communications Server and LiveMeeting to share you desktop or application. Office Communications Server even had its own PowerPoint integration option.

But now, with the use of PowerPoint 2010 and SharePoint 2010, you can share your presentation over the web (intranet, internet, extranet, it doesn’t matter).

How does this work? First of all, you set-up a PowerPoint sharing point. This is a site-collection and will not be used to store any content.

Second, you open up PowerPoint 2010. Let’s assume you already have a presentation you want to share. You simple go to Slideshow | Broadcast Slide Show. You will need to enter the URL to your SharePoint PowerPoint broadcast point (which we created earlier).

You will see a URL. This url can be send to the audience members of your presentation. You will use PowerPoint 2010 to do the presentation, your  audience will use the web browser. Easy…..

Online collaboration on documents (Word, PowerPoint – co-authoring)

This is something new. The ability to really work together on documents, instead of have to store documents with the “track changes” option. Simply take a look:

Sharing Notes – OneNote

You can now use SharePoint 2010 to share your notes in OneNote. SharePoint 2010 will acts as an in-between and your co-workers can add notes or modify existing ones. In real-time…..

And then there is also…

• The ribbon interface;
• The new SharePoint Workspace;
• Connect to Outlook options;
• The new Infopath Web Parts;
• Access Web Access – try the different templates (see here);
• The new drag & drop interface when adding documents;
• The Visio Graph Service (which is also used in the workflow status screen: cool!!!);

Yep: Microsoft have done it again. Nice and cool stuff…..