Hi everyone. Wanted to share some details and screenshots of the upcoming release of Chatter for SharePoint. The release date is still to be finalized – depends on what else I think I can reasonably finish in the next week or so.

In addition to performance tweaks and fixes, version 1.4 has some exciting new capabilities including:

• Ability to delete your posts and comments (admins can delete any post or comment)
• Poll support (users can vote, edit their responses and view poll results)
• New feed navigation (ability to select company, personal or group feeds right from the web part)
• File attachments now represented by product icons (Word, Excel, etc)

Let’s take a look:

As you hover over the right-corner of a post or comment, a delete icon will appear if you have permission to delete the item. After confirming you want the item deleted it will be immediately removed from the feed.

Users can now respond to polls created on Chatter right from the web part. You can vote or change your vote and view or refresh the poll results. Note – polls still must be created from SalesForce Chatter for now.

The web part has a completely new and intuitive navigation system. Clicking the feed control now displays a context-menu which allows you to select the feed to view or to refresh the current feed. When selecting Groups for the first time, the web part will load and cache all of the selectable groups and present them as a drop-down within the menu:

Finally – we have a number of ‘fit-and-finish’ improvements to the UI, including doctype attachment icons that leverage the SharePoint DOCICONS cache:

As you can see – a lot of new and useful functionality is in the works. I’m also considering a PowerShell script or GUI Setup to further simplify the installation. Also in the pipeline, but not in the 1.4 release, is support for language localization (RESX), @mentions and post-targeting.

So look for the new version shortly here on the blog and keep those suggestions coming in. I appreciate the support – and for those that haven’t bought the web part yet – what are you waiting for? Seriously – if your must-have feature isn’t in the solution yet, I can fix that. J

Disclaimer: Screenshots above are from the 2010 version and are still in progress. Final features and appearance subject to change, yadda yadda.