Microknowledge

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 64 bit support for Adobe PDF Indexing

For several years, Sharepoint 64 bit installations have faced a challenge in dealing with Adobe Acrobat PDF files.  [Apart from having to manually tweak the XML files to add the icon...]  Microsoft's search technologies, out of the box, understand the structure of their own Office documents.  This means they can index the contents of these documents to provide full text searching.  However, for third party products, especially Adobe Acrobat, they rely on third party providers to provide "iFilters".

 

What are iFilters?  They are simple extensions that allow a search indexer to crawl the contents of a file.  Although Adobe has always bundled the 32 bit version of its PDF iFilter with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, they didn't provide a 64 bit version.  Without this, indexing had to be relegated to 32 bit platforms.

 

Enter FoxIT Software. Fox (along with other companies) sells a 64 bit iFilter for Acrobat PDF files.  As a result, FoxIT became a dominant iFilter for companies needing 64 bit Sharepoint indexing.

 

After several years in development, Adobe has finally released the 64 bit version of their iFilter for Acrobat PDF files:

 

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025

 

iFilters provide support for full text indexing based on the contents of the file.  At this time, the iFilter is not bundled with Reader (as it is for the 32 bit platforms), nor is it available for Itanium 64 bit (IA64) systems.

 

So why pay for what Adobe gives away?  In short, performance.  Adobe's 32 bit filters ran more slowly than FoxIT, and that performance gap has extended to the 64 bit architecture.  It's also telling that Microsoft uses the Fox tools to index PDFs for its hosted Exchange solutions. 

 

My sense is that for users with small volumes (<500) of PDF files, the difference in index speed will be immaterial.  However, for other users -- especially medium to large Sharepoint farms with dedicated indexing servers -- the performance gains from the third party tools will be significant.

 

Sharepoint 2010 IT Implications

At last week's TechEd conference, Microsoft announced system requirements for the Office 2010 servers, which will include Sharepoint 2010 (and Project Server 2010.)  [often called Sharepoint 14 or SharePoint vNext]

 

Highlights include:

• SharePoint 2010 will be 64-bit only
• SharePoint 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or
  64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2
• SharePoint 2010 will require 64-bit SQL 2005 or 2008
• SharePoint 2010 will only support Internet Explorer 7 or 8 (IE 6 will not be supported nor other browsers)

This holds two key implications for IT teams currently supporting the 2007 platforms:

 

Server/Databases

All server builds need to be 64 bit, which will eliminate in place upgrades for 32 bit servers.  In addition, SQL 2000 is no longer supported.  Although most server hardware platrorms will support 64 bit servers, they can not be upgraded "in place" from Windows 32 bit architectures (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733167.aspx).  Nor can SQL be upgraded directly to a true 64 bit installation.  (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143393.aspx) 

 

The good news is that the recently released Sharepoint Service Pack 2 includes a new command line option that will check your Sharepoint installation for upgrade readiness: stsadm –o preupgradecheck.  This option generates XML and test logs that detail necessary prerequisites for a future upgrade.

 

Desktop

Many IT organizations are continuing to hang on to IE6 becuase of application compatibility issues with internal applications.  Although "publishing" sites will continue to support multiple browsers to view content, internal collaboration sites will not support IE6.  IT teams should identify any web applications that will require upgrades or mitigiation in advance of future Sharepoint upgrades. 

 

For more details, see the URL below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

Adding images to master pages used in SharePoint 2007 site templates

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 provides a simple way for power users to create a customized site and save it as a site template file (STP) to reuse on the site.  By default, the template is installed in the Template Gallery for the site collection. 

Master pages are heavily used in SharePoint 2007.  Master pages provide a central point for configuring look and feel, among other things.  However, graphic files can be a sticking point in master pages used in templates.  Since the template files may be attached to multiple servers, absolute links to images stored in a central repository may not work in a different environment.   Similarly, relative links to images may have variable paths since the pages that call the master page can live at different levels in the hierarchy – for example, default.aspx and list edit pages.

So this kind of image link can be problematic:

<img src="MyLogo.png">

Unless you go about putting copies of your graphic file in every directory of your site, this lihnk won’t work consistently. 

So let’s assume that you have a Picture Library already created on your site, called “Site Images”, and you’ve added your logo file there.  Two tricks can help.  The first is the runat tag.   This tag tells the server the interpret the link on the server relative to the location of the master page, not the actual page itself, so the link will be interpreted consistently throughout the site.

The second is using the ".."   relative reference to move up a level.    Since master pages, by default, are stored in the /_catalogs/masterpage directory, two iterations of this will get us back to the root of the site.  And we wind up with the following link code:

<img src="../../SiteImages/MyLogo.png" runat="server">