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.
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.
