Jerry Smith from Microsoft gave the first keynote for the Share2010 business-user conference in Sydney, Australia. He talked about new capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 clients to enable business users to do their work better.

Key points:

• Social Networking … the social networking capabilities in SharePOint 2010 are much better. Microsoft is trying to bring traditional business collaboration together with social networking.
• Business Intelligence … there are newer and better business intelligence capabilities in SharePoint 2010, that supports people using data to make better decisions.
• Content Management … content and collaboration in SharePoint is no longer intended to be PC centric, but should work seamlessly across browsers and mobile devices.

The session was basically an overview of new capabilities and how they can be used within a business context. As I have said before, in order for an organization to envision new ways of working, there must be an understanding of new capabalities and how they could be put to use.

Jerry quoted some customer success stories in each area, including financial numbers. I note, however, that comments on financial benefits were to do with licensing savings with SharePoint compared to legacy systems, not about business benefits per se.