Microsoft 2010 line stresses collaboration and governance

As you probably are acutely aware, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is coming out with a slew of new 2010 products shortly. Among those getting a 2010 facelift are Exchange, SharePoint and Office. Microsoft has tuned the 2010 line to encourage collaboration on the front end and make the tools easier to govern on the back end. Let's take a broad look at each of the products now.

Exchange Server 2010 SP1

In a comprehensive post, Forrester analyst Brian Hill outlined the changes due in Exchange Server SP1, which is slated for release later this year. In addition, to improved personal archiving, he writes:

"Microsoft plans a number of other Exchange 2010 SP1 advances to bolster retention, search, and other functionality that will support organizations' legal risk mitigation objectives."

As Hill points out, organizations are still struggling mightily around eDiscovery issues and these upgrades should help, although Hill says we shouldn't expect too much from these solutions. Still, for companies who aren't doing anything around email governance, this is at least a start.

SharePoint 2010

Microsoft heard its users complaints about governance in previous versions of SharePoint. It was so easy to use, sites would pop up all over the place creating a governance nightmare for IT. That's why Microsoft has added new tools to help improve governance in SharePoint 2010. As I wrote last November in my Editor's Corner, in which I interviewed Ryan Duguid, senior product manager, ECM at Microsoft:

"[Duguid] says that for 2010, Microsoft was trying to provide more comprehensive records management capabilities to give record keepers a more traditional set of functionality. 'Our goal for 2010 is to bring all the constructs to bear, to declare anything as a record in place, send it to archive, apply in-place holds or extract information from a secure archive [along with] workflow to manage information.'"

SharePoint 2010 is due for release this month and it should have improved governance tools. I look forward to hearing from administrators on whether or not this resolves some of the earlier issues.

Office 2010

Finally, we have Office 2010. There are tons of changes including bringing the ribbon interface across the suite, improved email management in Outlook and of course easy collaboration. As this article by Pete Babb in PC World notes, this version Office is all about collaboration. Microsoft has also made an effort, according to Babb, to integrate smoothly the products across the suite with one another and with SharePoint 2010. I've personally never been a big fan of Microsoft's implementation of the ribbon in 2007 (as I wrote in "Office 2007: One step forward, two steps back"), but I look forward to seeing what they've done this time around.

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