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Highlights from the SharePoint Conference 2009 - Day Two

Hello again from Las Vegas!  Here are some picked up bits from day 2 of the conference 

· The October 2009 SharePoint Cumulative Update will include a better preupgrade check in STSADM.  As you may recall, SP2 added a –preupgradecheck command line switch to generate a complete report on your farm and highlight any gaps in your 2010 readiness.

· Sat in on a good discussion on deployment best practices with EMC.  Some interesting ideas to keep in mind for organizations considering the nee multitenant functions for chargeback models.  Although some firms use strictly disk-based chargeback, other base their rates on feature activation, user count, site count, etc.

· Long term document management and grow unwieldy.  Remember that given normal growth rates, a document disposal plan of 10-30% really slows down ten year growth rates for your content.

· SharePoint 2010 comes with a new site template – the Document Center.  The Document Center is optimized to store up to 500,000 documents.  It includes all the new features, like rating and tagging, and in place records management.  But it also adds home page elements such as unique document ID’s, “Newest” document and “Highest Rated” summaries.

 

· The new Content Organizer can be used to migrate large legacy file shares.  As you document are migrated into the new server, the organizer can use rules and filters to route the documents to selected libraries, create folders-on-the-fly, and set new metadata properties.

· Some of the presentations suggest InfoPath 2010 will be the best way to touch up a list form. Others recommend SharePoint Designer.  Deciding between InfoPath and SPD is not a simple decision – in part based on the need for Enterprise CALs to render InfoPath forms.  I’ll be covering this more in a detailed post in the coming weeks.

Your First SharePoint 2010 Development Best Practices

Here are two new development best practices for SharePoint 2010 developers.  If you’re at the SharePoint Conference or another hands on training event, make sure to explore these.

· Get to know the Sharepoint CmdLets in PowerShell.  PowerShell is an enhanced version of traditional scripting and command line approaches to systems management and administration.  The cmdlets offer greater control (but less familiarity!) than STSADM.EXE.  You can register the SP- cmdlets using the Add-psSnapin PowerShell command, or use the preconfigured SharePoint PowerShell command prompt.  The easiest way to learn is to try to develop your own.  To give you a preview, here’s a sample script to add 3000 items to a test list:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(”Microsoft.SharePoint”)

##

$siteUrl = "http://yourhost.yourdomain.com"

$webName = ""

$spSite = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteurl)

$spWeb = $spSite.OpenWeb($webName)

$spList = $spWeb.Lists["YourList"]

##

##

for ($i=1; $i -lt 3000; $i++)

{

  $spitem = $spList.Items.Add()

  $spitem["Title"] = "Item"+$i

  $spitem["Number"] = $i

  $j = 1

  if ($i % 4 -eq 0){ $j = 2 }

  $spitem["Data"] = "datum"+$j

  $spitem.Update()

}

· For new custom code, implement with the SPMonitoredScope block.   In summary, this enables your code to  generate logged counters for the new Developer Dashboard.  Developer Dashboard gives detailed information on resource usage, performance, user interactions and error trapping.

SharePoint 2010 Version Numbers

OK, here it is – my first post on internal version numbers for SharePoint 2010.  Microsoft has skipped lucky number 13 – internally, SharePoint 2010 is version 14, and uses a hive inside web server extensions that we will all soon call the “14 hive.”  It will go into public beta in November 2009.

On a related note, Microsoft CEO  Steve Ballmer promised today (at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas) that there would be a better page in the future to help manage and track current published service pack and update levels for the product.

SharePoint 2007 Version/Release	Microsoft Support KB Reference	Version Number from Central Admin	Release Date
SharePoint Server 2010 Public Beta	N/A	14.0.0.XXXX	November 2009
SharePoint Server 2010 SPC2009 Demos	N/A	14.0.0.4524	October 2009
SharePoint Server 2010 Technical Preview “2” [another SPC2009 demo build]	N/A	14.0.0.4514	October 2009
SharePoint  Server 2010 Technical Preview	N/A	14.0.0.4006	25 April 2009

 

SharePoint 2010 Server - Infrastructure Recommendations

I’ve gotten to look at SharePoint 2010 for a few weeks now.  Here are some key thought points about its server infradstrucuture:

· SharePoint 2010 offers a new central service application called the Managed Metadata Service.  MMS lets an IT professional delegate this service to a knowledge manager, who can then use it to define a library of content tags and hierarchies to share across your SharePoint farm.

· SharePoint 2010 will be a 64 bit only platform.  Direct upgrades from 32 bits servers to 64 bit servers will require some advance prep work.  The basic requirements:

o   Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 X64

§  SQL Server 2005 x64 SP3 CU3

§  Or

§  SQL Server 2008 x64 SP1 CU2

· On the client side, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox and Safari will all be supported.  However, IE6 will not be supported, so IT shops that had been deferring that upgrade should plan accordingly.

· SharePoint 2010 will provide a server based version of most Office applications – Office Web Access, or “OWA”.  [It's going to be hard to stop thinking only of web access to Exchange as “OWA”!] In part, this enables simultaneous multiuser editing of Office documents:

o   Excel in OWA, not client

o   Word/PowerPoint on client only if file opened from a shared document library

o   OneNote client or OWA

· The 2007 Shared Services Provider has been broken up.  Each of its elements is now a “Shared Service Application”, and you can mix and match them singly or in groups, as needed, to match your farm’s actual needs.  [No need to deploy Visio Services if you don’t use it.]

· Site subscriptions are a new element.  Site subscriptions are groups of site collections, and you can delegate administrative control over a range of sites as a result.  Although this was designed for shared hosting providers in a multitenant environment, this could also prove useful in large decentralized enterprises.

· There is some support for more granular restores from a content database backup.  Administrators will be able to browse the backup and identify a list or library to pull out without attaching and mounting the entire database.

Highlights from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 - Day One

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas.  Some highlights from the first day of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009:

Steve Ballmer announced the public beta of SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, (and Project Server 2010) will be available for download in November.    The final RTM release dates will be sometime in the first half of 2010.

Other news:

· Microsoft has launched a new site for SharePoint 2010 at http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx.  SharePoint 2010 Forums are open on TechNet and MSDN.  There’s also additional SharePoint 2010 beta information on TechNet at  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee428287(office.14).aspx

· Microsoft also announced SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel (Client) and SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint (Server).  PowerPivot is the result of “Project Gemini”.  Briefly, it allows users to access millions of rows of data from Excel or SharePoint.  Further details at www.powerpivot.com

· For developers, SharePoint 2010 now runs on Windows 7 and Vista.

Update: SharePoint 2010 Predictions

As I write this, I’m enroute to Microsoft’s 2009 SharePoint Conference.  In a prior post, Eight things to look for in SharePoint 2010, I promised an update on my predictions after last month’s preview of SharePoint 2010 in Atlanta.  Here’s how I did:

Where I was right

· Two way data exchange via the Business Data Catalog.  Microsoft has greatly enhanced what’s now called Business Connectivity Services, or BCS.  BCS adds three great new capabilities:

· Read write access to remote data sources

· Exposing remote SQL tables (and other sources) as editable, native SharePoint lists (so you can use datasheets, RSS feeds, etc.)

· Republishing BDC data to other application, such as Office 2010.  This means you could have a remote contact list in your CRM system, link it as an editable list in SharePoint 2010 and republish the list as a Contacts list in Outlook.

· Richer end user form design for SharePoint lists, and support for a relational data model, child grids, etc., without InfoPath  Mostly there – InfoPath is greatly enhanced as the non-developer interface for customizing list based forms.  This will certainly be available in SharePoint Server, although I’m not yet sure how this is supported in SharePoint Foundations (f/k/a Windows SharePoint Services [WSS] 3.0).

 

· Better tools for bundling and applying changes to existing objects that have already been deployed to production.  Definitely – all updates can now be easily packaged as WSP packages in SharePoint Designer 2010 as well as Visual Studio 2010.  You can now use Visio 2010 to design a simple workflow, extend it using Designer, and make detailed enhancements in Studio, all using a common interface to package the deployment

 

· In line editing of page content.  Simpler than ever to create and edit pages, using wiki syntax, and customize themes and brands all from the browser without needing to understand HTML, XML or CSS.

 

· Better Web 2.0 style social networking for the enterprise.  A big win – there’s extensive support for Twitter style microblogging, LinkedIn style expertise finding, Facebook-like wall posts, Digg/Del.icio.us tagging, ratings, etc.  You get the picture:

 

· Silverlight based native support for streaming media, especially video.  SharePoint 2010 adds supports for audio and video as managed content types, along with a Silverlight client to stream audio and video to the browser UI.

Still waiting

· Simpler debugging for web parts, especially ASP.NET  Probably, but I haven’t seen it yet.

 

· Real blog editing with better permalinking URLs for external sites and in line editing.    The editing’s better, but the permalinking is still pending.

 

· Improved security model integration between Project Server2010 and SharePoint 2010.  No information on this yet – as the Magic 8 Ball says, “ANSWER HAZY.  TRY AGAIN LATER.”

 

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more news from SPC 2009.

SharePoint 2010 Preview

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas!  With Steve Ballmer’s announcements this morning at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, I can finally tell you all the great new things coming in SharePoint 2010.

I was greatly privileged to get a head start working with an early version of SharePoint 2010.  Some to these features, as always, may be revised as we get closer to the ship date (which I don’t know, sorry.)   I’ll have more to share as the week progresses, and more detail coming over the next few months, but here’s a summary of some of Microsoft’s key investments in the new platform:

Sites:

SharePoint 2010 supports IE7/8 as expected – but also adds full support for Firefox and Safari.  It will be easier than ever to create and customize attractive pages for your sites.  Many SharePoint 2007 sites still remain focused on the document library, with the somewhat clunky Content Editor Web Part used to update page content.  Branding was largely limited to the in the box themes, unless users were comfortable with CSS. 

SharePoint 2010 now favors an inline content editor that uses wiki syntax, along with a theme builder right in the browser UI.  Multilingual support is greatly enhanced, and there’s much better support for managing and serving digital media (audio/video) directly from SharePoint.  In addition, “OWA” now means Office Web Access – there’s a browser based, server hosted version of almost all Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, One Note, and Outlook.

 

 

Communities

Social networking – especially Facebook and Twitter – have exploded in the three years SharePoint 2007  was released.  Enterprise users have come to expect the same types of Web 2.0 interactions from their enterprise web platforms.  SharePoint 2010 makes good on the promise by adding or extending contemporary social networking, including:

· Twitter style microblogging

· LinkedIn style expertise finding

· Facebook-like wall posts,

· Digg/Del.icio.us tagging,

· User-driven ratings (1-5 stars, etc.)

· Wikis and blogs

· People/expertise search

· RSS feeds [not new]

 In addition, there a fantastic new Silverlight based org chart browser, which relies on your Active Directory information to generate a real-time navigational view of your enterprise hierarchy.

 
 Content

Library support gets better – you can now hoist up to 50 million items in a library, and there’s a new out of the box Document Center template designed to offer an optimal experience for a larger (500,000) item doclib.

Records management also gets a big overhaul – when you declare a document a “record”, you can now leave behind a “shortcut” link to point to a new location in the Records Center, or you can manager an official record in place.

But probably most exciting is the new Managed Metadata Service.  MMS will let you define a central hierarchy of document tags and groups and share them across multiple web applications and site collections.  There’s also support for watching enduser-defined tag trends (“folksonomy”) and promoting commonly used terns to the enterprise standard store.

 
MMS tags and ratings are also surfaced through the UI as navigational elements, both in documents libraries and in search results.  You can reach across content anywhere in your farm to find all documents tagged as “Marketing”, for example. 

 
  

For knowledge management, this means you can define your knowledge taxonomy independent of a physical or organization hierarchy, to be able to find relevant information wherever it lives.

Search

Microsoft has made greater improvement in the 2010 search platform.  Relevance engines are refined to help show more accurate results from the outset.  There’s also better support for federated search (pulling in remote search engine results) and faceted search (drilling down through results by tags, dates, or other classifications. 

 

Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of the FAST reporting engine, extends these great capabilities further.  Let’s suppose that you work in construction.  A search for “Windows” is likely to mean different things to a glass designer than an IT professional.  FAST allows you to customs results based on a user's role.  FAST can also find and interpret metadata embedded in documents -- such as locations, dollar values, and dates – without users need to add keywords.  FAST results can show better previews and full results counts in refinement “facets” (the left hand navigators above).

Insights

Performance Point dashboards and Excel Services are well integrated in the new release, allowing much simpler deployment of interactive data modeling solutions.  Dashboards may be Excel oriented for drilldown through very large data sets using an optimized Excel interface (this is part of “Project Gemini”).  Or business processes can be monitored and exposed as diagrams using the hosted Visio Services.

There’s also a great new Chart Web Part that can tie out to all these rich data sources.  Charts can be extended using the “Decomposition Tree” to let you drill back, graphically, through a chart to find elements that contributed most or least significantly:

 

 

Composites

SharePoint 2010 is a stronger application platform than ever.   Three key investments here:

· InfoPath becomes the tool of choice for customizing end user list and forms without coding

· SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio add support for publishing all enhancements as WSP packages, which can be shared across the spectrum of development complexity (a WSP solution can also be extended in Studio, etc.)

· SharePoint joins the BCS.  No, SharePoint 2010 isn’t angling for a Fiesta Bowl bid – it’s the new Business Connectivity Services, which replaced the 2007 BDC (Business Data Connector).  In the BCS world, there’s a new Content Type called “External Content”.  External Content refers to a data set -- such as orders, customers, products – that live in an external data but look like a read write SharePoint list in the browser.  External Content can also be republished to other applications, such as Excel or Outlook 2010.

Infrastructure

Some upfront fundamentals.  SharePoint 2010 will be a 64 bit only platform.  Direct upgrades from 32 bits servers to 64 bit servers will require some advance prep work.  The basic requirements:

· Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 X64

· SQL Server 2005 x64 SP3 CU3

o   Or

· SQL Server 2008 x64 SP1 CU2

On the client side, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox and Safari will all be supported.  However, IE6 will not be supported, so IT shops that had been deferring that upgrade should plan accordingly.

In the Office 2010 suite, Groove has been rebranded as SharePoint Workspace 2010.  Workspace gives a full range of offline, synchronized access to SharePoint forms and lists, in addition to the document library support already provided under Groove 2007.

Finally, there are some much-needed enhancements to the core server infrastructure:

· Services “a la carte” – rather than using one monolithic Shared Service Provider, you can mix and match among User Profile support, BCS, MMS, Excel Services, Visio Services, etc., to only deploy services you need.

· The code “sandbox”, which allows untrusted end user code to run in a throttled environment to prevent runaway code form impacting the rest of your farm

· Elimination of the indexer as a single server, single point of failure in larger farm topologies.

In general, Microsoft has extended an already rich product even more.  As we’ve seen before in SharePoint, Microsoft likes to introduce a raft of new feature and refine them in the next release.  The core document manegement, search, data access and personalization features are likely to be the most robust.  Newer functions, such as multitenancy, often require more care in implementation and training.  For example, when should you use an MMS keyword instead of a tag store?  Or how best should we control multiuser editing in Excel Web Services or Word?

Obviously, I’m still wrapping my head around all the new features, and will have more to share soon.  Thanks for reading.

SharePoint 2007 August 2009 Cumulative Update v2 – Use caution

Microsoft has recently announced some potential issues in the August 2009 Cumulative update packages for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  These issues relate to a specific administrative technique of reattaching an older content database that was left detached during the update, although there are some workarounds.

http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2009/09/14/important-be-careful-when-installing-wss-august-cumulative-update.aspx

Microsoft has pulled the original version of the update package and replaced it as of 1 October 2009.  The version number, for those of you who track SharePoint version numbers, remains 12.0.0.6514.  This revision only affects the “WSS” package – the original update package for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server remains unaffected.  Likewise, the four Project Server 2007 core databases are unaffected by this behavior.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joerg_sinemus/archive/2009/10/01/new-build-available-for-august-cu.aspx

This will only impact users who downloaded the August 2009 updates but haven’t yet deployed them – in which case you should visit the following link to get the revised version of the update.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;973400

In general, KMA doesn’t advocate immediate deployment of Cumulative Updates as soon as they are released, unless you are experiencing a specific problem.  Please let us know if you have further questions – thanks.

(By the way, the title reminds me of “Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Thursday Edition” for packing multiple data and version references into a single title.)

Last.fm and Xobni…music AND lyrics for personal knowledge management

I’ve been reading and considering some of the distinctions between information management and knowledge management lately.  It’s a common theme – how to turn information into real knowledge.  Let’s look at two major areas of personal knowledge management – music and email.

Several years ago, a good friend of mine introduced me to Audioscrobbler (now Last.fm).  The software sits behind the scenes on my PC or Windows Mobile device, tabulating what songs I play, and synchronizing back to last.fm (it also works on fruit-based (Apple) MP3 players.)  I originally started using it to help discover new music -- since I’m well past college, I need all the help I can to find new music (e.g. U2, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones or Muse, the Fratellis, Gaslight Anthem).  

There are now Facebook and desktop widgets so every visitor to my Facebook profile can see what I'm listening to.  (I don’t think anyone else really needs this information, but it’s there.)

Xobni, in concept, is similar.  Xobni (that's “Inbox” backwards) integrates with your corporate email inbox, and tabulates who, where and when you send or receive messages.  The information is stored locally – there no central repository for Xobni.

Both services, then, compile a time series of events about me, tracking attributes like artist-album-song or recipient-domain.   However, I’ve found that Xobni’s analytics give me much greater insight than Last.fm.  I can use Xobni to find out where and when I need to be more responsive in my communications, and where I do a good job.  Xobni makes it pretty easy to figure out not just which domains receive the most email traffic form me, but the top people in each domain.

For strictly personal reasons [my top 100 songs of the decade] I’m trying to explore my music cabinet in greater detail.  Let think about a similar question: here are my top 10 artists of all time on Last.fm.  Which are my top songs for Spoon – is it all two or three songs, or are the songs well dispersed with their discography?  Unfortunately, this isn’t a question Last.fm can answer.

· 1    Spoon    294

· 2    U2    285

· 3    The Beatles    271

· 4    The Police    225

· 5    Fountains of Wayne    211

· 6    Wilco    204

· 7    Radiohead    174

· 7    Coldplay    174

· 9    Steely Dan    169

· 10    Chris McNulty    154

· 11    Foo Fighters    153

· 12    Pixies    146

http://www.last.fm/user/cmcnulty2000/charts?subtype=artists

However, Xobni can show me the aggregate hourly traffic to and from each of my contacts:

I would love to be able to distinguish my music trends are in the car vs. at home, morning vs.,. evening, or even over a custom data range.  Unfortunately, I’m locked in to day ranges of 7, 90, 180, 365, or all time.  Year over year (who don’t I listen to), under-listened genres.  Why are my top 12 artists and songs of all time so widely divergent?  All good questions.  But that’s fundamental to (self) knowledge management, and why Xobni does a much better job at knowledge management than Last.fm.

Don’t get me wrong – I use Last.fm meticulously, and study my charts closely.  Its reliable, easy, and fun.  I just want more.

Server Virtualization Tips and Tricks

I promised a followup to my previous post on virtualization for SharePoint developers.  Here are a few additional tips and tricks to keep in mind if you’re starting a development server virtualization project.

· Check for antivirus updates.  Older version of some server antivirus software had issues with the first releases of Hyper-V.

· Turn on hardware-assisted virtualization in the host system BIOS

· Turn on PING for ICMP (provide batch file)

· For Hyper-V or Microsoft Virtual Server, install Integration Services on each VPC.  This gives each guest system access to shared folder, cut and paste, drag and drop, and mouse support.

· Remove older virtual server extensions from any Virtual Server 2007 (or older) hosted guests before migrating to Hyper-V

· When virtualizing Exchange 2007 or SQL Server 2008, use actual host physical disks or LUNs, instead of VHD virtual disks, for best performance results.