Some other SharePoint 2010 tidbits

I recently interviewed Ryan Duguid, senior product manager ECM at Microsoft, about upcoming changes in SharePoint 2010. I went over what he promises for governance in my Editor's Corner last week, but he also discussed some other matters including CMIS and search.

Dugid says that Microsoft is fully committed to CMIS and in fact made major announcements at the ARMA Conference in Orlando in October and followed up with another regarding CMIS at the SharePoint Conference. "We will deliver CMIS support," he said. This includes support for consumer facing and developer framework components. He, of course, pointed out that specification is still out for review and is still subject to ratification by OASIS.

Search is a part of any content management package and Duguid says Fast Search, which was purchased by Microsoft in January, 2008, will play a role, but he says having access to metadata and social tagging should also help SharePoint users navigate the content in the system. He also points to a new service in SharePoint 2010 called Managed Metadata Service. This allows administrators to manage metadata as a central service across sites, servers and SharePoint farms and provides a way to centrally manage corporate taxonomy information, typically defined by record keepers and librarians along with folksonomies, which provide a more organic way for end users to tag and identify information across a set of content.

He points out that the path of ECM is littered with failure and that Microsoft's goal with SharePoint 2010 is to put the end user front and center (while providing more comprehensive back-end administration). The idea, he explains is to get the end user to use the system. If it's too hard or too restrictive, then end users will always find ways to work around the system to the detriment of the CMS. It will be interesting to see as the SharePoint 2010 beta goes into wider use, and use cases emerge, how well Microsoft has solved this perennial issue.

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