Support for Office Web Applications in SharePoint running in Google’s Chrome browser is among the key new features in the SP1 release of SharePoint 2010, now expected at the end of March.
Microsoft highlighted the features and timeline in a blog post on the SharePoint team blog yesterday, saying the release enhances security, stability and performance.
When the online Office tools were released last year, Microsoft did not include Chrome as a supported browser; the company and Google have been at odds, as each has tried to move users to their software, either Office or Google Docs.
Other enhancements include what Bill Baer, senior technical product manager at Microsoft, described in the blog as “long-awaited Site Recycle Bin functionality” that will enable IT pros to recover site collections and sites accidentally deleted without having to restore the entire database to recover the deleted sites or collections. The process, he explained, is similar to the Recycle Bin used for lists, libraries and documents.
Also, Microsoft has added “shallow copy” functionality that lets users move site collections between content databases without having to move the underlying unstructured data.
Further, storage space allocation has been restored in the service pack, with the added feature of being able to understand document size and storage quotas as actionable information to clean up content.
