SharePoint 2010 Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: Find All Features in SharePoint 2010

With SharePoint 2010 hosting you have now more choices and capabilities when it comes to collaboration in your company. SharePoint hosting includes the products Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 by Microsoft. With these applications you are able to collaborate within your company (intranet) or your customers (extranet) while hosting the whole application outside your company. This means you can offer social networking, a platform for sharing files, blogs and wikis, as well as a platform for distributing information without the need to maintain own servers, plan for backup and restore or security. All of that is done by a hosting provider.

A few features and capabilities offered by a hosted SharePoint platform include the possibility to subscribe to RSS feeds in order to get updates about new or changed content. With announcements you can create news for all or a certain group of customers using different permissions. Using that you can push or pull news and information you need.

Using contact lists or calendars you can synchronize your own calendar and contact information stored in Outlook 2007 or 2010 with the information stored in SharePoint. E. you can create a meeting workspace with the information and documents stored in SharePoint and synchronized with Outlook. All documents stored at SharePoint can be made accessible to other people who can edit and share the latest version. Documents include Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations. You can directly access and open the documents using you browser. After saving a document the current version is also stored inside SharePoint meaning you don't need to store them locally.

Further more you can create task list in order to track the status of a certain assignment. You don't necessarily need to open SharePoint since the task list can be synchronized and managed directly in Outlook. The task list allows a project manager to monitor the development of a project and to keep track of every single assignment.
SharePoint 2010 allows you to create and use blogs and wikis enabling you to publish information or to collaborate on articles with you customers and colleagues. Blogs and wikis are only two site templates offered. Additionally there are team sites for collaboration, a search center or other templates applying to business tasks like marketing, sales management or IT management.

This is another features on SharePoint 2010:

- Sandbox Solutions – now solutions built from the SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio are all .WSP. Great to see that consistency, but beyond that now SharePoint administrators can control the resources consumed from these client deployed sandboxed solutions which don’t require the admin to deploy. While in the past SharePoint administrators needed to deploy any solution, this option, yep it’s an option, allows you to throttle the system resources and allow those who own/administer sites to deploy solutions. The delegation and control is there. I think we’ll see much more best practices from more usage of sandboxed solutions, but now custom farms can still run out of the box software. It will be very interesting to see what can be done with these and how well the throttling of system resources works with these solutions.

- Service Applications – The service oriented architectures and the buzz words of what SOA has become get a huge boost in SharePoint 2010. I’d like the search from the central portal, the profiles from the social media farm, the taxonomy and meta data from the ECM environment, and analysis and access services from the Finance deployment. As farms have become more specialized in large enterprises so have the expertise of those that run them. The one off custom farms that may end up departmentalized, don’t have to be limited in their services.

- Large lists – the list throttling was shown off in SharePoint 2010, but the real list sizes showing real scale and control from the farm administrator was impressive. This was definitely used by the competition in the previous version to suggest that SharePoint didn’t scale. Despite the ability to scale to 5 million items in a list in the 2007 version, the 2000 item limit per view was often suggested as a limit for the list due to poor use by end users of the features such as indexed columns, limiting the views or using folders. Now with multi column indexes, and better control over item limited views, you can ensure that the queries are optimized and the list throttling and viewing will be better managed for performance of the server and the list. The happy hour controls is a happy medium for those needing to break out to do queries that are not the best.

- BCS: Business Connectivity Service(Sharepoint 2010)- old BDC Sharepoint2007

You can access data from LoB application and manipulate it using sharepoint 2010, In sharepoint 2007 BDC had some different tendency to work with -where you need to write code a lot to add new item into your LoB application, but with SP2010 you can manipulate data without any difficulty and item can be manipulated using BCS Service- now Microsoft has released it as a service. And you can host this service on different server to make your application much faster.

The most important thing about SharePoint hosting is the accessibility through the browser. Using your browser and SharePoint hosting you are not limited inside you company and firewall to access your information. You are able to access them from different locations using different devices like mobile devices. The management itself is also done using the browser: enabling access, setting permissions or creating sites and lists is only some of the things you can do. With SharePoint 2010 you are now not limited to user Internet Explorer. You can now use browsers like FireFox, Safari, Opera or Chrome to collaborate. By the way: While Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are now supported Internet Explorer 6 is not supported.