Got SharePoint? Over at The Dean's Office, Dustin Miller lists a long - and exciting in a geeky way - list of what's coming up in the next version of SharePoint - which is due for release in late 2006 as part of the next version of the Office system.

HUGE improvements coming, and v2 to v3 will be an upgrade, not a migration. Phew! Check out the list.

A good Channel 9 video showing/discussing SharePoint v.next is here.

  • RSS on all SharePoint lists - and access to the feeds respect the SharePoint security model

  • RSS feeds are per-list and per-site (aggregated)

  • Support is for RSS 2.0

  • Out of the box blogs AND wikis! (and you get RSS feeds for those, too)

  • Lots of search improvements and enhancements

  • Outlook 12 will have an aggregator, IE7 also has one

  • WSS v.next runs on ASP.NET 2.0, so ASP.NET v2 web parts are SharePoint web parts

  • Version history in all SharePoint lists - with line-by-line diffs! Nice!

  • Take documents off-line and bring them back

  • Workflow built in - see a Channel 9 video about that here

  • Document management significantly built out

  • Email enabled discussion boards - send email to a SharePoint alias and it shows up in the discussion list! Nice - great internal option to things like Yahoo groups. You can also sync emails, tasks and other stuff to a SharePoint site from the Outlook UI.

It's going to be a big year for Microsoft's Office and Office Servers. Huge, really.