Microsoft Gold-Certified Consultants

Business Collaboration with SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's comprehensive platform for business collaboration, is designed to facilitate the creation and maintenance of web sites for a variety of group activities such as sharing information, co-authoring and managing documents, distributing reports, and providing advanced business analytics by integrating multiple local and remote databases and visualization resources. SharePoint 2010's focus on teamwork through information sharing can have a profound and positive impact on your business culture and your bottom line.

SharePoint 2010 is distributed in three primary versions. SharePoint Foundation 2010, formerly called Windows SharePoint Services, is a minimalist version available as a free download and offers the basic functionality of SharePoint 2010 for use within the corporate firewall. SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise editions are licensed products designed exclusively with a 64-bit architecture and offering a vast selection of tools and features for building and managing secure, collaborative web sites. A special Developer's version is also available. All versions of SharePoint 2010 incorporate significant enhancements over previous releases of SharePoint.

Progent's Microsoft-certified consultants can provide cost-effective online consulting and development expertise to help you design, implement, manage, and troubleshoot SharePoint 2010 deployments that can include web sites able to function as portals, intranets, extranets, document and media management solutions, blogs, wikis, data warehouses, business analytics, enterprise-wide search engines, workflows, and other tools to promote and improve collaboration. Progent can help you integrate SharePoint 2010 with Microsoft SQL Server and with third-party databases as well as with Microsoft's familiar desktop applications including Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, and Project. Progent can help you migrate from earlier versions of SharePoint or adapt a multi-vendor mix of web technologies into a consolidated and more manageable SharePoint 2010 environment.

Progent can also help you create high-performance and fault-tolerant server farms to host SharePoint Server 2010, enhance your network infrastructure and security, assist you with server virtualization and clustering to lower equipment costs and improve availability, show you how to configure efficient remote and mobile access to SharePoint 2010 web sites and tools, develop custom business applications, and deliver affordable online webinar training to your IT staff and your SharePoint 2010 user base.

New Features of SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 includes a wealth of new and enhanced features that make this release a significantly more powerful platform for business collaboration than previous versions of SharePoint. These enhancements cover all six capability areas which Microsoft uses to categorize the functionality of SharePoint 2010: Sites, Communities, Search, Content, Insights, and Composites.

The Sites capability area refers to SharePoint 2010's unified infrastructure that supports the ability to share, manage, and publish documents, projects, and information within groups that can include colleagues, partners, vendors, and customers. Communities covers the software tools that allow constituents to collaborate plus management resources available to manage these tools. The Search capability area includes intranet search, people search, and the tools to design and deploy specialized search-based applications. By Content Microsoft means Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tools that allow you to define document types, enforce compliance standards, set retention policies, and automatically sort content. The Insights capability area refers to SharePoint 2010's ability to generate feature-rich management reports that allow actionable information to surface in the form of scorecards, dashboards, and charts built from data extracted from a wide selection of sources. The Composites capability area refers to the ability for managers and end-users to create powerful custom sites and pages without having to write code.

The innovations and enhancements SharePoint 2010 brings to these six capability areas are extensive. Many of these new features require the Standard or Enterprise editions of SharePoint as well as the latest releases of Microsoft Office products. Some samples of these improvements in each category include:

• SITES
  – Web Editing
  – Shift in focus from collections of lists to pages makes editing tools more consistent and intuitive
  – Expanded Browser Support
  – Firefox, Safari, and various smartphone browsers can now view and edit SharePoint 2010 sites
  – SharePoint Workspace 2010
  – SharePoint client now allows offline work, supports synchronization, and integrates with InfoPath 2010 forms
  – Office Web Applications
  – Works with Web companions for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for co-authoring and from any computer
  – Personalization
  – You can configure various Web Parts and content to display differently based on audience membership
  – New Web Parts
  – New or enhanced support for applications like RSS feed monitoring, KPIs, summary links, and searches
  
• COMMUNITIES
  – My Sites
  – Social networking enhancements including user profiles, newsfeeds of recent activities, and "Ask Me About"
  – Social Feedback
  – New features like social and expertise tagging, shared bookmarks, five-point content rating, and note board
  – Wikis
  – Now incorporated into all team site pages for easy editing and inclusion of Web Parts, media, and lists
  – Blogs
  – Enhanced support for sorting posts by category and date plus team blogs for internal and external customers
  
• SEARCH
  – Relevance
  – Adds URL fuzzy matching, social tags, metadata, and social behavior for better search rankings
  – Refinement
  – Search by content type, location, author, last modified date, or metadata tags, plus 'Did you mean' hints
  – Windows 7 Integration
  – Search results can be returned through desktop search integration with Windows 7
  – People Search
  – Supports phonetic name matching, Outlook mining, and searches based on social distance and behavior
  – Enterprise scale
  – Permits multiple instances of SharePoint's crawler, indexing, and query components for better performance
  – FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
  – Deep linguistics and text analytics technology supports searches within unique business environments
  
• CONTENT
  – Document Management
  – New tools include Content Organizer, Document Sets, Document IDs, and Managed metadata service
  – Records Management
  – Support for in-place records management improves collaboration and retains rich context for documents
  – Rich Media Management
  – Expanded management of multimedia content including Asset Libraries and the Media Player Web Part
  – Web Content Management
  – Usage monitoring plus improved editing oversight and web analytics to control branding and page layout
  
• INSIGHTS
  – Excel Services
  – Provides Excel-based capabilities like sorting, filtering, PivotTables, PowerPivot, visual slicers, and sparklines
  – PerformancePoint Services
  – Now included, makes it easy to create dynamic dashboards and scorecards with data from multiple sources
  – Visio Services
  – Support for rendering Visio diagrams and charts within a browser and indexing them for easy search
  – Chart Web Parts
  – Wizards let you add Chart Web Parts to SharePoint 2010 web pages and configure represent your data
  
• COMPOSITES
  – Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
  – Builds on SharePoint 2007's Business Data Catalog for integrating external data for read and write operations
  – SharePoint Designer 2010
  – Allows administrators to control the use of SharePoint Designer or restrict users to specific functions
  – Workflows
  – Permits users to create workflows in Microsoft Visio 2010 and export them to SharePoint Designer 2010
  – Microsoft Office Access Services
  – Allows Access developers to deploy Access tables, reports, forms, and macros to SharePoint sites
  – InfoPath Forms Services
  – Helps you render InfoPath forms within Web browsers, Microsoft Office clients, and SharePoint Workspace
  – Sandbox Solution
  – Protects server farms by enforcing thresholds for CPU and memory utilization, database query times, etc.
  

Progent's Microsoft-certified consultants can help you assess the potential business benefits of implementing SharePoint 2010 either as an upgrade from an earlier release of SharePoint or as a first-time installation. If you are migrating from a prior version of SharePoint, Progent can help you plan, test, and execute a smooth upgrade that can include a simultaneous move to the latest versions of SQL Server, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Project. For first-time deployments of SharePoint, Progent can help you inventory your information assets and help make sure that all relevant data sources are coordinated seamlessly within your SharePoint environment. Progent can also help you convert mixed sets of collaboration and businesses reporting tools into a unified, easy-to-maintain solution based on SharePoint technology.

Progent's Windows Hyper-V consultants can design a virtualization solution that cuts costs while maximizing the availability and simplifying the management of your SharePoint server farm. Progent's System Center Data Protection Manager consultants can help you establish a backup/restore process and design a disaster recovery plan to protect your SharePoint ecosystem, and Progent's network security engineers can provide a full range of security and compliance services to ensure that authorized individuals and groups who collaborate through SharePoint can access resources safely. Progent's business intelligence (BI) reporting consultants can show you how to integrate multiple data sources and visualization tools, such as Excel Services and Visio Services, with SharePoint 2010 to create custom management analytics solutions that address the unique demands of your business.

Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE network engineers can help you solidify your network infrastructure so that your entire SharePoint community can access the information they need conveniently and securely whether they are inside your corporate firewall, at a branch office, working at another company, telecommuting, or travelling. Progent can also provide custom SharePoint 2010 webinar training classes to individuals or groups to help your company get up to speed fast with the most productive ways to manage and utilize your SharePoint 2010 environment.

If you are considering an upgrade from SharePoint Server 2010 to a more current version of SharePoint Server or to SharePoint Online, see Progent's SharePoint Server 2016 migration and hybrid cloud consulting or SharePoint 2019 migration consulting.

Save Time and Money with Progent's Online Consulting Services for SharePoint 2010
Progent's team of online IT experts can provide cost-effective remote consulting, troubleshooting, and custom development services for SharePoint 2010. Online support eliminates the expense and delays of travel so that all your consulting investment goes directly toward your solution. Progent has provided online IT support to clients in every state in the U.S. (see Progent's customer testimonials). By moving projects forward rapidly from the development stage to the production stage, online support also allows a faster payback on your IT investment because you spend less on development and start accruing returns faster.

Contact Progent for Help with SharePoint 2010
To get in touch with Progent about consulting, troubleshooting, or application development support for SharePoint Server 2010, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.