Reasons Upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

Upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a focus for many organizations over the next few months, particularly for organizations currently using earlier versions of the software. There are different options that can be used in order to bring content from SharePoint 2007 over to SharePoint 2010:

Reasons for updating and move to SharePoint 2010 to help you succeed.

1.Read/Write to Line-of-Business Applications

BDC becomes BCS (Business Connectivity Services) with even much easier systems integration.BCS now supports updating, deletion and insertion of data into an external data source from within the SharePoint interface. Another key advantage of BCS is that it will enable SharePoint Lists to be created directly based on a database table. External systems that Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can connect to include SQL Server databases, SAP applications, Web services (including Windows Communication Foundation Web services), custom applications, and Web sites based on SharePoint.

2.Improved Document Management and User Experience

Manage all the core aspects of your documents including check in/check, versioning, permissions, history and workflow. Some of the features are

•  Document ID – Every doc has a unique identifier and unique link.  I can send you a link to a specific document and the link will work no matter where the real document lives.
• Content Organizer – A user can submit documents to ‘SharePoint’ and the Content Organizer will make sure it goes to the right place, even if that place resides in another site collection!
• Document Storage – Storage capacities have been massively increased and documents can optionally be pushed outside SQL Server, such as to the file system.

SharePoint 2010 UI is much smoother and richer with features like

• Office Ribbon: Microsoft has also taken advantage of the ever popular ribbon UI and incorporated that into SharePoint 2010.
• Popup windows: SharePoint 2010 has a new framework for showing dialogs to the end-user. The dialogs allow people to work with some data without losing focus on the page they were working on to get things done.

3.Improved Search

With the new capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010, search administrators can configure an optimal search infrastructure that helps end users find information in the enterprise quickly and efficiently. Search results provide easier and most flexible filtration and having the ability to include federated search from Google or Bing makes search results efficient. Search is powerful that ever with FAST Search which allows them to find information and saw preview of search results without even opening the documents.

4.Social Features

SharePoint 2010 top features for you as a University is the Social Features of SharePoint 2010.  Now students and teachers can get together easily and share information and knowledge using the Facebook like functionality available at My Site.  Tagging, Note board, Rating has been provide which allows everyone to get connect to what others are doing and see the common interest items. Improved Blog template which provides blogging from Office word or Live Writer allows users to publish personal or enterprise blogs very easily. Creating WIKI pages on the fly and allowing other people to comment results in fast collaboration and knowledge development.

5.Improved Business Intelligence Features

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 BI is another area with significant improvements. A developer dashboard to track the performance of pages, and monitors and alerts based on logs and events. It also features a new Web Analytics service. SharePoint 2010 Digital Asset Management of Videos, Images etc. and users can simply drag and drop images and videos on the pages. Share and view Visio diagrams within SharePoint which allows users to publish data driven Visio diagrams that can be rendered in the browser. The service also enables data-connected Microsoft Visio 2010 Web drawings to be refreshed and updated from various data sources.

6.Improved SharePoint Designer and InfoPath Enhancements

SharePoint Designer now has the familiar office ribbon interface and can easily perform actions such as customizing lists, changing layouts and creating simple workflows without having to write code. Administrators can block the ability to perform certain actions such as modifying certain SharePoint pages and restricting access to certain areas with the SharePoint setup. Customization of list forms with InfoPath 2010, an InfoPath Form Web Part, Forms with code-behind can be deployed using sandbox solutions, creating a site template will produce a WSP package which includes the InfoPath forms.

7.Improved Developer Productivity Enhancements

The new developer features in SharePoint 2010such as LINQ (Language Integrated   Query) to query in principle, any data source whatsoever from a SharePoint List, XSLT for customizing a SharePoint list and Silverlight. The data platform improvements include: List Relationships, Unique Column Constraints, Data Validation, and Column Formula Validation. Closely related to the new Web Part is Silverlight Cross-Domain Data Access that enables secure, cross-domain, integration between Silverlight applications and SharePoint Foundation deployments. The SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed Client Object Model lets you write client-side code to work with all the common objects in SharePoint sites. Through the object model, you can add and remove lists, add, update, and delete list items, change documents in document libraries, create sites, manage permissions of items, and add and remove Web Parts from a page. Visual Studio 2010 is tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010 and provides full support for SharePoint 2010 development, deployment and debugging. The solution package is a compressed file containing all of the necessary components such as features, web parts, list definitions, assemblies, customized ASPX pages and workflows.

8.Improved Admin Insights

SharePoint 2010 provides several new tools that allow monitoring and troubleshooting SharePoint environments. These includes

• Sandbox Solutions: Now solutions built from the SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio are all .WSP.Finally, administrators can enforce quote limits on resources consumed by sandbox solutions to prevent abuse.
• PowerShell for SharePoint 2010: PowerShell is a command-line scripting tool that provides an administrator full access to applicable application programming interfaces (APIs). SharePoint 2010 Products to manipulate Web applications, site collections, sites, lists.The administrators has the ability to script, which makes for an improved experience from past product versions.

9.Improved Service Applications

In SharePoint 2010, Service Application model replaces the Shared Service Providers (SSP) model of SharePoint 2007.Services are no longer combined into a SSP. Services are running independent as a service application. The Service Application model a web application to be attached to more than one Service applications and each service application can have its own database. Services like Search, Managed Meta Data, User Profile,(20 services in SharePoint Server) are running independently. You can configure which services are running on an application server. Per web application you can configure which services are consumed.

10.Improved Workflow Features

SharePoint 2010 alleviates these challenges by allowing the workflows created using SharePoint Designer to be saved as templates for reuse.Another major improvement is the ability to modify out-of-the-box SharePoint workflows (e.g. Approval workflow, three-state workflow).Users are no longer limited to associating workflows with just lists and libraries, and can now also target content types and Site Workflows.With Outlook 2010, users are able to respond to workflow requests and update items by using various workflow options within the application.Workflow models can be created in Visio 2010 for further editing in SharePoint Designer 2010.In SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create reusable declarative workflows.These reusable workflows do not rely on a specific list but can be associated with any list.