In 2009, Black Blade brought concurrent document authoring and virtual documents to the WSS and MOSS 2007 platforms through our docBlock Ascend appliance.  Now we bring you even more powerful features in SharePoint 2010.

Once your organization upgrades or implements Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, new features will be available from your docBlock Ascend appliances.  Here is a sneak peak at how the docBlock Ascend will extend the new platform:

1. Document Sets: Document Sets augmented with the docBlock Ascend can now produce a document from the various components of multiple Document Sets, as well as feed content from Document Sets into larger virtual documents.  In addition, you can create Virtual Document Sets that group multiple virtual documents together into one Document Set.
2. Metadata Services: The new MSS 2010 metadata system augmented with the docBlock Ascend can apply metadata down to the granularity of document parts.
3. Microsoft Word Services: MSS 2010 Word Services augmented with the docBlock Ascend can now allow users to edit portions of documents while maintaining the granular governance, workflow capabilities, and low bandwidth support that made the docBlock Ascend an indispensible add-on to the SharePoint 2007 platform.
4. Microsoft Word 2010: Microsoft Word 2010 can allow controlled co-authoring on document parts when the documents are stored on a docBlock-enhanced SharePoint server. Users can now leverage granular governance, workflow capabilities, and low bandwidth support with Word 2010 co-authoring capabilities.

The docBlock Ascend features:

1. Concurrent Authoring: Multiple authors can edit the same virtual document at the same time.
2. Granular Governance: Apply permissions, version control, and change management policies to document parts.
3. Per-section Alerts: Workflows, alerts, and event receivers can now act on individual document sections.
4. Fine-grained Discovery: Use metadata, tagging, and configure search to return whole documents or just relevant portions of documents.
5. Low Bandwidth Support: Users no longer need to download or upload an entire document, only the parts in which they are interested.
6. Cloud Compatible Services: The docBlock Ascend appliances automatically scale, load-balance, and failover for large enterprises, hosting, or cloud computing solutions.

For more details on how docBlock Ascend enhances SharePoint and Word 2010, read the feature comparison page.