Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 has some interesting improvements in this area as well. You can give documents a unique ID identifying them in the complete system. The document center shows you the highest rated documents and the 'Modified by me' documents. I'm sure other filters are possible.

Documents can be rated with stars and yet again, Microsoft has this philosophy that a content management system is driven by its users. If many users let the system know that a certain document is important, the document really must be important ! Documents can also be tagged and this can be applied to any document, any page, any blog post, ...).

A cool new thing is the 'Document Set'. It's a number of documents grouped together and shown as one. It's a little bit like folders. The document set is a new kind of content type so it has its own metadata, workflows, ... .

You can now define 'Shared Columns' which are a central place of defining columns. They can be easily pushed down to documents in the document set which gives you a little but more governance control over content types in SharePoint. You can also capture the document set by either requesting the lastest major version or the latest major and minor versions.

Microsoft really made an effort in making working with SharePoint more easy. It's not always easy to get people to work with a new technology and let them use it right. Users had a lot of problems finding the correct place in SharePoint to save a certain document or they just didn't have the correct metadata available at saving time. You can now define places within SharePoint a user can select from within the client so he knows where to save his stuff.

The 'managed metadata service' or 'taxonomy term store' is a way of sharing metadata over a number of site collections. You can import this from a CSV and there is language support.

Flexible compliance

You can now have multiple records centers and with SharePoint Designer workflows you can move a document but leave a link so previous visitors will always be able to find it.