Sneak Peek: SharePlus v3 Update & Roadmap

Jason Beres [Infragistics] / Tuesday, February 28, 2012

 I have gotten a ton of requests from customers in the last few weeks around the roadmap and vision for the next version of SharePlus.  One of the most important ‘features’ of a mobile App seems to be that it gets updated often, purchase decisions on the App Stores are made based on how recent an update was, and what the version number is.  The deployment model is much different than a traditional line of business app, where a yearly or longer update cycle is acceptable and the norm.  We plan on sticking with the expectation on the mobile user. Our plans call for multiple updates per year, starting with the v3.0 launch in the March / April timeframe.  When we purchased SouthLabs, we did so because we believe in their product and where it was heading.  We did not intend on tinkering with vision or roadmaps, it would be counterintuitive to mess with a good thing.  

So with that, let’s talk about v3 of SharePlus.  In v3 we’ve spent an enormous amount of engineering effort to change the core SharePoint API calls from synchronous to asynchronous.  This helps features like background server synchronization behave like you’d expect.  Going asynchronous also enhances the overall user experience when accessing lists and document libraries of all sizes.

Here is a breakdown of features you can expect in v3 by product configuration.

Feature

Lite

Pro

Enterprise

Verify connection button

Email Viewer

Contextual Menus

Web View

Account Management

Rich Text Editor

 

Asynchronous Backend

 

Picture Swipe  

Quick Links / Power Favorites  

Disable Auto-Lock  

Web App based Edit  

Offline filter & sorting  

Offline search    

Advanced List Search    

Enterprise Search    

User Profiles Search & Detail    

Permission based hiding    

Configurable URL Based help    

 

 

This release no doubt includes a bunch of killer features – the Enterprise Search and User Profiles Search & Detail being two of more exciting ones (in my opinion of course).  These features really bring a deeper integration into the experience that many of us are used to on the desktop with SharePoint.

I plan on a What’s New in v3 webinar sometime during the week of March 25th.  I will post an update to that date with a signup link once I’ve finalized it with marketing.  I will also share some screenshots once I get the latest bits installed.

If you are looking for SharePlus features that you haven’t seen, or if you love what your seeing, shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com.