SharePoint 2010’s Accessibility feature provides templates, master pages, controls and Web parts along with technical documentation to advance MOSS accessibility for people with disabilities. SharePoint 2010 accessibility provides built-in support for keyboard navigation and support for industry-wide accessibility standards.

Accessibility is an important part of any collaboration or web content management system. For SharePoint this is no exception. As a starting point, SharePoint adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, WCAG 2.0, and set a goal for Level AA.

SharePoint 2010 Accessibility feature is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. SharePoint 2010 delivers broad changes to describe content and media and to explain controls.

Features of SharePoint 2010 Accessibility kit include the following:

1. Keyboard interaction has been a basis in feature evaluations to maximize device compatibility and usability
2. Proper heading structures have been added to pages for informational, organizational, and navigational benefits.
3. Across SharePoint, improved language support has been added and integrated this information into the pages and into the advanced editors page
4. SharePoint supports browser settings to zoom content and operating system features to increase font sizes.
5. New design efforts help declare Doc Types and specify CSS-standards rendering for the master pages. This has dramatically improved the cross-browser support.
6. Broad investments were made to update the markup to be like well-formed XML, and the new rich text editor has clean markup and a function to convert its content into XHTML.

Take advantage of SharePoint Accessibility and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by Apps4Rent. Also see feature comparison of SharePoint Foundation vs Server 2010. We offer free SharePoint with our hosted exchange plans. MOSS 2007 is also available.

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SharePoint 2010 Out-of-the-box Web parts add functionality anywhere in a site with point-and-click simplicity. There are around 40 out-of-the-box Web Parts available.

Find some Out-of-the-box Web parts below:

Lists and Libraries – These are similar to the same Web Parts offered in MOSS 2007.

- Announcements
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Links
- Shared Documents
- Sites Assets – Use this library to store files which are included on page within the site such as images on Wiki pages
- Tasks
- Team Discussions

Business Data

- Business Data Actions
- Business Data Connectivity Filter
- Business Data Item
- Business Data Item Builder
- Business Data List
- Business Data Related List
- Indicator Details
-Status List

Content Rollup

- Content Query
- HTML Form Web Part
- Picture Library Slideshow Web Part
- RSS Viewer
- Web Analytics Web Part – Displays the most viewed content, most popular search queries, or most popular clicked search results as reported by Web Analytics fo rthe site or site collection
- XML Viewer

Documents

- Document Set Contents – Displays the contents of the Document Set
- Document Set Properties – Displays the properties of the Document Set
- Enter a Document ID – Finds a document by its Document ID
- Relevant Documents – Displays documents that are relevant to the current user

Filters

- Choice Filter
- Current User Filter
- Date Filter
- Filter Actions
- Page Field Filter
- Query String (URL) Filter
- SharePoint List Filter
- SQL Server Analysis Services Filter
- Text Filter

Media and Content

- Content Editor
- Image Viewer
- Media Web Part – Use to embed media clips (video and audio) in web page
- Page Viewer
- Silverlight Web Part – A Web Part to display a Silverlight application

My Information

- My Calendar
- My Contacts
- My Inbox
- My Mail Folder
- My Tasks

Navigation

- Categories
- Site Aggregator
- Sites in Category
- Summary Links
- Table of Contents
- Tag Cloud – Displays the most popular subjects being tagged inside your organization

Office Client Applications

- Excel Web Access
- InfoPath Form Web Part – Use this Web Part to display an InfoPath browser-enabled form
- Visio Web Access – Enables viewing and refreshing of published Visio Diagrams
- WSRP Viewer

People

- Contact Detail
- Note Board – Enables users to leave short, publicly-viewable notes about a page
- Organization Browser – Displays each person in the reporting chain in the interactive view optimized for browsing organization charts
- Site Users
- User Tasks

Performance Point

- PerformancePoint Filter
- PerformancePoint Report
- PerformancePoint Scorecard
- PerformancePoint Stack Selector

Search

- Advanced Search Box
- Dual Chinese Search – Used to search Dual Chinese documentand items at the same time
- Federated Results
- People Refinement Panel – This web part helps the users to refine people search results
- People Search Box
- People Search Core Results
- Refinement Panel – used to refine results
- Related Queries
- Search Action LInks
- Search Best Bets
- Searhc Box
- Search Core Results
- Search Paging
- Search Statistics
- Search Summary
- Search Visual Best Bet – displays visual best bets
- Search Federated Results

Miscellaneous

- Chart Web Part – Helps you visualize your data on SharePoint Sites and on a SharePoint portal.

Take advantage of SharePoint Out-of-the-box Web Parts and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by Apps4Rent. Also see feature comparison of SharePoint Foundation vs Server 2010. We offer free SharePoint with our hosted exchange plans. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or  MOSS 2007 is also available.

With the best SharePoint hosting price plans in the industry, Apps4Rent provides any sized business the power to integrate the virtual collaboration technology into their business model and streamline communications at a minimal SharePoint hosting price rate of $8.95 per month.

In SharePoint 2010, you can be connected to Microsoft Office Clients. How? Using SharePoint 2010’s Connect-to-office feature by letting Microsoft Office applications know which SharePoint libraries you frequently use. When you connect a library to Office, the library is available in the Office Back Stage for opening and saving files. When you want to create a new Office document, you can view the list of templates in connected libraries as well as local and online templates.

Take advantage of SharePoint Connect-to-office feature and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by Apps4Rent. Also see feature comparison of SharePoint Foundation vs Server 2010. We offer free SharePoint with our hosted exchange plans. MOSS 2007 is also available.

With the best SharePoint hosting price plans in the industry, Apps4Rent provides any sized business the power to integrate the virtual collaboration technology into their business model and streamline communications at a minimal Microsoft SharePoint hosting price rate of $8.95 per month.

Audience targeting in SharePoint 2010 (now available in hosted mode for Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise versions) is one of the significant features of SharePoint 2010 that helps target groups and individuals with specific pages, Web Parts, and content. With the help of audience targeting feature, content can be targeted in a site for viewing by one or more specific audiences. SharePoint 2010 supports targeting using rules-based audiences, SharePoint groups, and distribution-list memberships. These audiences can span one or more sites in a given deployment. In addition, SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to target any list item, not just the lists. This means that virtually any individual item within the site – documents, events, custom list items, and even entire sites – may now be targeted to specific audiences.

Using the Audience Targeting feature of SharePoint 2010, Web Part content can be targeted in the following ways:

1. Web Parts can be targeted so that members of different audiences see different Web Parts on a page
2. Using Web Parts that recognize audience membership, items or links in a list can be targeted to one or more audiences, so that only members of those audiences can view the targeted items within the Web Parts. read more…

Now you can reduce your administrative expenses by allowing SharePoint 2010 to take control of your accounts. How? SharePoint 2010 Managed Accounts can automatically reset passwords based on domain policies and notify administrators when passwords are expiring. By storing account information in SharePoint 2010 Managed Accounts, you can keep your information secure and reduce the overhead required to manage it yourself. In brief, a Managed Account is effectively an Active Directory user account whose credentials are managed by and contained within SharePoint. In addition to storing the credentials of the object, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 can also leverage Active Directory Domain Policies to automatically reset passwords while meeting the requirements established by policy.

How Managed Accounts credentials are stored?

Managed Account credentials are encrypted using a farm encryption key that is specified when you run PSConfig[ui].exe at farm creation based on the passphrase. The passphrase is stored read more…

What is Document ID Service?

Whenever you try to move a document within a site collection, the broken links appear? Don’t worry now! SharePoint 2010 has come up with a new Site Collection feature called the Unique Document ID Service.

How to enable the Document ID Service?

To enable the Unique Document ID feature, you can go to the Site Settings -> Site Collection Features (under Site Collection Administration) or you can launch the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and run the following:

PS C:\Users\blairb> Enable-SPFeature -id docid -url <site collection url>

After installing the Unique Document Service, you will see that your document has a field called Document ID. Note that for existing documents some action has to be taken on the document to cause a Document ID to be generated (like check-in/check-out.) Any new documents will have a Document ID generated read more…

What is a SharePoint Health Analyzer?

Want to quickly find and fix potential problems across all of the servers in your farm? Then don’t forget to take a look at SharePoint Health Analyzer. SharePoint Health Analyzer is a feature in SharePoint 2010 that allows administrators to schedule regular, automatic checks for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems in the server farm. Any errors that SharePoint Health Analyzer finds are identified in status reports that are made available to farm administrators in Central Administration. Status reports that are produced by SharePoint Health Analyzer explains each issue, list the servers where the problem exists, and outline the steps that an administrator can take to treat the problem. In some cases, errors are repaired automatically as soon as they are found, and farm administrators are informed of the repairs. read more…

Today, SharePoint 2010 offers many new improvements for workflow developers and builds on the popularity of workflow in SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint workflow is recommended for long-running human workflows where we are often waiting for people to complete tasks.

Changes in Workflow Model Design Tools
SharePoint 2010 provides more choices in tooling to better fit the needs of those creating and maintaining workflow models. The tools for workflow development include Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, and Visio 2010. SharePoint 2010 requires .NET Framework 3.5. The next version of the .NET Framework 4.0 is currently in development but product timelines meant SharePoint 2010 was not dependent on it.

SharePoint Designer 2010 also has a new graphical workflow designer for designing workflows and deploying them directly to SharePoint. It can also be used as a prototyping tool before workflows are further developed in Visual Studio 2010.

Another improvement in SharePoint Designer 2010 is that it now allows you to edit the out-of-the-box workflows that come with SharePoint. It will also use InfoPath forms if InfoPath is installed or the Data Form Web Part read more…

In SharePoint 2010, there is an interesting feature called Client Object Model (Client OM) which is a unified model that uses the same or similar programming concepts as the Server Object Model (Server OM). The Client Object Model can be accessed via web services, via a client (JavaScript) API, and via REST.

Why Client Object Model?

You must be thinking now why should I have Client Object Model when millions of sites are running smoothly without the Client Object Model. So here is the answer to your question – Client object Model is the result of SharePoint customers’ request to Microsoft to introduce more and more web services to get data out of SharePoint. But introducing web services will not fix the issues, as Microsoft found, because then the request for more functionality in the web services will continue. Even if Microsoft provides a good number of web services with SharePoint, customization in web services will be required for different clients, and this will make the out-of-the-box web services unusable. Also introducing a large number of web services will be a waste as not all companies will use all the web services functionalities. Thus, in order to add more web services from users, Microsoft has taken a different approach called Client Object Model (OM). read more…

You have a portal? Want to integrate some external data into your portal in a meaningful way? Nothing to worry! Here’s Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Business Data Catalog (BDC) to facilitate this exact scenario. Microsoft’s business data catalog makes it easy to surface external data inside a portal experience. For instance, you can create an XML definition file that defines the mapping between SharePoint and your external data so that it can be rendered in a Web Part, used as a column within a list, and even integrated into search.

Though BDC in MOSS 2007 enabled connectivity to external systems, it was difficult to create solutions due to lack of a designer. Moreover, though BDC made it relatively easy to create read-only solutions that display data in the Business Data List Web Part, it was not so simple to create a solution that enabled users to make changes and write that data back to the external store.

Consequently, Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 came into picture as a savior! Business Connectivity Services is all about connecting to external data. Business Connectivity Services enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services, and tools that streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services. Business Connectivity Services is build upon its BDC predecessor in the key areas of presentation, connectivity, tooling and lifecycle management. In SharePoint 2010, it’s easy to create an external content type with SharePoint Designer, create an external list in SharePoint’s Web user interface, and take the list offline into Outlook as a set of contacts. Also, you can make updates to contacts in Outlook that will cause the data in the external system to update as well.

Key Components that comprises Business Connectivity Services include the following:

o BDC Metadata Store – The BDC Metadata Store provides storage for a collection of external content types, each of which describes how to connect to the external store. The Metadata Store acts as part of the services layer. External content types are a fundamental building block of business connectivity services
o BDC Server Runtime – The BDC Server Runtime understands how to reach into the back-end store and connect to data based on the external content types defined within the content type store. It’s important to note the new usage of the acronym BDC to refer to the set of services that provides connectivity that is a component of business connectivity services
o Security – Business Connectivity Services provide integration with the Secure Store Service (SSS), as well as enable your own security model
o Solution Packaging – Solutions built with Business Connectivity Services can be packaged as a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) package to be delivered to a rich client, including SharePoint Workspace, Outlook and Word. Business connectivity services also exposes APIs to extend solution packaging to target additional clients
o Out of Box UI – Business Connectivity Services carry forward the ability to display external data through a Web Part UI and provides deeper integration through the addition of external lists.
o BDC Client Runtime – A symmetrical runtime is provided for client and server, enabling you to take solutions offline with a client-side cache and to connect and push changes back to the server in a consistent manner. Use of the BDC Client Runtime enables offline operations, interacting with the external data cache.
o Design Tools – SharePoint Designer provides a wealth of out-of-box functionality for creating business connectivity services solutions, including the ability to define external content types and external lists, and to define InfoPath forms to surface the data to create simple solutions. Visual Studio provides the ability for the professional developer to extend those capabilities to create advanced solutions while leveraging the existing framework.

These components in the Business Connectivity Services architecture enable interaction with additional capabilities in the SharePoint platform, including business intelligence, enterprise content management, collaboration and social features, and enterprise search. Additionally, the use of business connectivity services provide a compelling developer platform that enables the creation of solutions to quickly take advantage of these capabilities.

Take advantage of SharePoint Business Connectivity Services and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by Apps4Rent. Also see feature by feature comparison of SharePoint Foundation vs Server 2010. We offer free SharePoint with our hosted exchange plans. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or  MOSS 2007 is also available.

With the best SharePoint hosting price plans in the industry, Apps4Rent provides any sized business the power to integrate the virtual collaboration technology into their business model and streamline communications at a minimal SharePoint hosting price rate of $8.95 per month.