No rest for Microsoft SharePoint...Hot on the heels of its SharePoint 2010 coming out party last week in Las Vegas, the SharePoint team headed to San Francisco for the new western version of the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week where they announced the new social aspects of the upcoming SharePoint 2010.

Features include:

• Dynamic news feeds in social profiles, which provide a way for users to stay up-to-date on changes of people in the enterprise in whom they are interested. Microsoft also bills this as an expert finding service (but I'm not clear on how that would work).
• Tagging: Just what it sounds like, this enables users to add tags to entries to help identify it, categorize it and find it later. I find it hard to believe that SharePoint didn't have this ability prior to this.
• Rich Text editing and audio/video streaming in blogs and wikis. Again, a little shocked that this is new, but clearly needed by many enterprise users.
• Better ability to manage social content in records management context. This is an essential element and Microsoft claims that it provides a way to manage these records for general records management, disposal and eDiscovery purposes. While this is a positive step, it's still difficult to manage these records across the many different sites, which in a typical large enterprise setting could run into the thousands. That's why companies like EMC are marketing products to manage SharePoint repositories.
  

I'm actually a little disappointed in this announcement because it seems a little thin to me. Perhaps Microsoft has decided it's best to leave these features to third party partners as they do with much of the SharePoint ecosystem. They provide a basic level of functionality and let the partners handle the rest.

For more information:
- see the Microsoft press release

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