New Web Parts Introduced in SharePoint 2010

Microsoft has introduce numerous new Web Parts with SharePoint 2010. Here are some of the new WebParts which are available in SharePoint 2010.

1. Tag Cloud: This Web Part displays the most popular subjects/tags being tagged inside the SharePoint site.

2. InfoPath Form Web Part: This is a new and wonderful web part. Helps to display InfoPath forms into SharePoint pages very quickly.

3. Visio Web Access: To show the Visio diagrams and helps to enables viewing and refreshing of published visio diagrams.

4. SilverLight Web Part: Earlier to show a silverlight app in SharePoint 2007 it is very complex and involves many steps. Now a web part to display a Silverlight application by just specifying the XAP file.

5. Picture Library Slide Show Web Part: Lot of time it is required to display a slideshow of images and photos from a picture library. This WebPart helps to do that.

6. Web Analytics Web Part:This Web Part displays the most viewed content, most popular search queries, or most popular clicked search results as reported by Web Analytics for the site or site collection.

7. Organization Browser: This Web Part displays each person in the reporting chain in an interactive view optimized for browsing organization charts. This Web Part is build using SilverLight.

8. Note Board:This Web Parts give the ability for the users to leave short notes about the Web Page. These notes are avaialble to view by everybody.

9. Chart Web Part: This is a great Web Part introduced in SharePoint 2010 and allows to create rich charts with the data stored in SharePoint. We can select multiple kind of charts like Pie, line and then point to data source to show the charts.Chart Web Part can take the data from the following data sources:

• BDC
• Lists in SharePoint
• WebPart
• Excel Services

10. Refinement Panel: This Web Part is helpful with the search results and enables the users to refine search results.

11. Sites in Category:Displays sites from the Site Directory within a specific category

12. Media Web Part:Again a very useful Web Parts and help to embed media clips (video and audio) in a web page. This Web part is also build in Silverlight.

Introduction to Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is next generation of the Business Data Catalog functionality (BDC) provided in the SharePoint 2007. BCS which is part of SharePoint 2010 provides rich features to connect to external data sources such as Oracle, Siebel, A Web Service, A Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Service or a .NET class. BCS also allows to connect to external data sources using Office Applications such as Excel, Access and Outlook. So now using BCS we can get the data from external systems in these apps and then consume the data.So as an example now we can get the sales data in a Office Word Form and update the data from this Office Word Form.

With BDC it was not possible to update the data in the External Data. BCS allows to create, read, update and delete external data from SharePoint.

Two important concepts to understand with BCS are:

External List: An external list is a list based on data from an external system outside of SharePoint.This list can be created using SharePoint 2010 UI from Site Actions ->View All Site Content -> Create. Once this list is created we need to map this list with the External Content Type.

1. Workflows: We can not attach workflows with the items in the external list.

2. Item Permissions: There are no item level permissions in the external list.

3. Export to Excel: We can not export the content from the external list to excel.

4. Versioning: External List does not support multiple versions with the list items.

5. Item History: There is not item history.

6. Datasheet View: We can not see the list in the data sheet view.

7. RSS Feed: No RSS feed is supported on External List.

External Content Type: External Content Type is a new content type and it describes the schema and data access capabilities of an external data source. It also define what actions can be taken on the external data inside SharePoint. One of the coolest part of this is that External Content Type can be created using SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio.

Editing Documents in Offline mode in SharePoint using SharePoint Draft

SharePoint provides a very good functionality of editing the document while we are not connected to the SharePoint site and sync it back with the updated document from the local machine to the Document Library when we are connented to Network. We can Check Out the document, keep working on the documents offline and when we Check In automatically the latest document from the local machine is updated in the SharePoint site. So as an example, suppose we have some documents which we have in SharePoint document library which we need to work while we are in a aeroplane, with this feature we can do that and when later connected the latest document from the local machine will be synced.

The Checked out document are saved in SharePoint Draft folder. This setting can be done from Save Options from the Office Clients as shown.

Now we can go to any document library and Check Out the the document it will ask whether we want to use "Use My Local Draft Folder".

We need to check this option  to make the document available in SharePoint Draft Location after Checking Out. Now this document is availably locally and we can edit as and when needed while not connected. Now once we are connected to the Sharepoint we can Check In the document from the SharePoint Document Library and latest document from the SharePoint Draft folder is updated in the site. With this we are saved from the hassels of removing the old version and uploading the new updated version. Once the document is checked in the document is not available in the draft location.