Overall Highlights - Improvements to InfoPath and, in particular, InfoPath Services

We came into this conference excited to see SharePoint 2010 in general but have come out really buzzing about a few things in particular -

1. Access Services

2. BCS (Business Connectivity Services) replacement for the BDC. Awesome new way to bring external data into

3. Improvements to Infopath and, in particular, Infopath Services and its closer integration into SharePoint. The ability to replace the old WSS list forms (display, edit etc) with rich InfoPath forms boggles the mind with endless possibilities.

In a nutshell, Access Services allows you to completely publish a relational database into SharePoint with rich looking Ajax based aspx forms with all the functionality you would expect. Conditional formatting etc.

Key features

- Build relationships between SharePoint lists.

- Incredibly quick dev time.

- report server web part OOTB

- build site templates. Develop then deploy anywhere!

James' highlight - Nintex Workflow 2010

The upcoming release of Nintex Workflow 2010 will build upon the new enhancements of the Workflow Foundations enhancements of publishing workflow at a site or list level. These features will greatly enhance workflow usability but the guys at Nintex have also added the ability to publish workflow templates across site collections. This will enable you to publish your workflows across the whole organisation quickly and easily. 

A public beta will be available sometime after the public beta of SharePoint 2010. If you are interested in running a beta of SharePoint 2010 or Nintex Workflow 2010 then contact us and register your interest and we will keep you posted with updates.  

The really good news is that the Microsoft Workflow Foundation has not been changed and has mainly enhanced. This is great news because it will mean your workflows should migrate easily.  

Early tests of migrating to Nintex Workflow have been extraordinarily successful due to the stability and backwards compatibility with Workflow Foundation. 

If you are planning to migrate to SharePoint 2010 or Nintex Workflow 2010 then don't wait for the betas - you can start auditing your existing workflows now, so when it comes time for the migration and testing then you know what workflows your organisation currently has deployed.

Alana's highlight - bulk check in and check out are finally here!!

The new document management features in SharePoint 2010 have been improved dramatically and benefits exist for end users, site owners and site collection administrators.

For the end user, bulk check in and check out are finally here!! Version control, metadata and content types are here to stay. You can still use the corporate taxonomy to tag your documents, however, where corporate taxonomy is not fitting, you have the opportunity to specify your own key words allowing you to perform open searches or find the documents using the 'tag cloud' in your profile. Create shortcuts to your favourite SharePoint sites with one click and then later use any of the office programs to open templates or save documents in your site.

For site owners, ensure content is saved in the correct area by creating rules to route a document to a specific folder based on metadata provided by the end user. Set up Information Management Policy events to remind your content owners to update documents and archive or delete content once it reaches a certain age. Develop your own taxonomy in your libraries and set up navigation so that end users can sort, filter and search using this metadata.

For site collection administrators, your content types can now be shared across site collections and even across farms. Define corporate taxonomy at the top level of your site collection either by manually entering or importing your terms from a csv file. See terms being used by site owners in lower level sites and take any common terms that are being used and incorporate them into your corporate taxonomy.