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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

My wishes for the next version of SharePoint

I am pretty curious about the new and improved functionalties in the new SharePoint platform. I find the current version, SharePoint 2010, an amazing platform with so many great features but there is always room for some improvement ;-).

I wrote down a couple of features I hope are going to be implemented in the new version.

Overview of permissions per user
Since SharePoint 2010 it's possible to get an overview of the users with permissions within a site. I would love to be able to generate an overview with all the users and their permissions within a site collection. I believe there is 3rd party tooling to solve this or even PowerShell but to be honest this should be available out-of-the-box.

Views with permissions
Views are an amazing option within lists and libraries. You can present your content to your end users by using metadata. There are options to sort, filter or even group content based at the attached metadata. There are occasions where you don't want users to view other users data. The IT department site can have digital order forms with orders from all the users. You don't want user A to see user B's orders. You can create a view that only shows the items of the logged in user, by setting up a filter, but a clever users can go to the allitems.aspx view and still see all the orders. You could delete this view but that would not make your administrations happy. I would love to be able to set permissions on a view.

Table of Contents webpart
This webpart has been around since MOSS 2007. It is a nice webpart to use when you have an empty site, with no content, and multiple sub sites. You can use the table of contents webpart to display these sites. This makes browsing easier for your end users. The other nice thing is that your landing site is not empty. The only issue with this webpart is that it shows lists and libraries. There is no option to specify what content you want to show.

My Site sorting profile fields
I really hope more people share my frustration about this feature. The sorting of My Site profile fields is unbelievable time consuming and frustrating. You have to click multiple times at a small arrow for a field to get a higher or lower position in the list. It even gets worse when you create additional fields. Those fields start at the bottom of the list. There is also a bug where you cannot get the field to go beyond a certain field ( I believe Forest ID). I have always find this strange because working with column orders in lists and libraries is so easy. I really hope this is going to change.

Visual workflows
I frequently use SharePoint Designer to create workflows. This is not an easy tool for every user. This is mainly because of the text based interface. I really prefer a visual interface such as Nintex Workflow 2010. This is so much easier for power users to create their own workflows and be less dependent on their IT supplier. I hope this becomes available in the next version of SharePoint or SharePoint Designer.

Content Query webpart and site collections
The CQWP is one of the most powerful webparts in SharePoint. It´s great for gathering information from different sites within your site collections. This is also one of the downsides. You cannot gather information outside of your site collections. I really hope this comes out-of-the-box with the new version.


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