SharePoint provides everything that a company needs to collaborate – the only thing that is missing is the collaboration. SharePoint allows teams to share files in a secure and flexible environment. Organizations are able to streamline their workflow methodologies so as to enable their workforce to operate in the most intuitive way possible. But file sharing is only the means of enabling collaboration to take place, and true collaboration has been impossible – until now.

Although SharePoint allows documents to be securely shared between team members, there is presently no way to actually collaborate on those documents. As soon as one team member opens a file, it is locked to all other potential collaborators. A team member either waits for the file to become available, contacts the person who has it open and begs to be given access, or works on a read-only copy of the original. Either of these options is cumbersome, counter-intuitive and non-collaborative, and the final option can lead to a wealth of non-integrated versions. Office 2010 promises to change all of this by finally allowing teams to work together on a single document.

In the future, instead of being locked out, each team member will able to work on a different part of the same document. The sections being worked on are visible to all team members and are the only parts of the document to be locked. Each member makes their changes available to the others only when they are willing to do so, and each is able to update their own version with the other changes at a time that is suitable to them. In this way they all work uninterrupted by the other activity and maintain complete control over their own revisions. 

This represents true collaboration for the very first time. Teams will work together on documents at the same time in an intuitive way but entirely on their own terms. SharePoint 2010 will provide organizations with many exciting, advanced collaborative features, but it is Office 2010 that may just pull the biggest punch. With the deployment of both, we are finally entering a world of true collaboration for the very first time. Collaborative software has finally come of age.