Datasheet

for the proposal, a PowerPoint presentation that walks the customer through your proposal, and an
Excel document that contains the fi nancials of your proposal. Together, this content is your proposal.
With SharePoint, you can put all of this content in a document library, but you still must maintain
each piece of content separately because you can ’ t check out the set of content or perform a workfl ow
on the entire set. This is solved by Document Sets in SharePoint 2010.
With 2010 ’ s new Document Sets feature, you can combine disparate content into a set and provide
metadata, a user interface, a workfl ow, and document management on the individual content and
the set. The easiest way to think about a document set is that it is just an enhanced folder type in
SharePoint. With the set, you get a Welcome page that you can customize, metadata for the set
and default metadata you can push into the content in the set, and even default content that can
be created when the set is created. Document sets can be versioned independently of the versioning
of the content in the set. Finally, you can export the set, and SharePoint will zip together all the
content in the set for you.
Word Services
One of the biggest feature requests for Microsoft Word has been a server - side, programmable
version of the Word engine to allow applications to convert documents or perform document
assembly. Because the Word object model is not supported in a server environment, the only other
choice is to write to the OpenXML format so that you can hand - generate a document to meet your
needs. However, OpenXML is XML, which is not the easiest thing to create from scratch given
its verbose nature. With SharePoint 2010 ’ s Word Services, you now have an API on the server that
provides conversions and assembly without having to write to XML APIs. This is useful in many
scenarios. For example, if you ’ re working for an insurance company and you need to generate the
insurance policy for your clients, which involves pulling information from your backend systems,
emailing the policies to your agents, printing them, and mailing them to the end customer, Word
Services can perform these steps on the server for you, giving you fast throughput document creation
but in a format that is human - readable and editable.
CMIS Support
Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a new standard that allows for the
interoperability between content management systems. The standard is sponsored by Microsoft,
IBM, Oracle, Alfresco, OpenText, and a number of the other vendors in the content management
industry. From a technology standpoint, CMIS is not just a create, read, update, and delete (CRUD)
interface to the different systems that support the standard. It provides higher - level semantics that
work across all systems such as check - in and check - out of the systems. The standard is built on other
industry standards such as REST APIs for performing the operations against the different systems.
What ’ s New in ECM: Records Management
Records management is a newer workload to SharePoint, fi rst introduced in SharePoint 2007.
With 2010, this workload gets some much needed features that make SharePoint 2010 a viable,
enterprise - capable records management solution.
What ’ s New in ECM
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