First day yesterday and I did have to twitter everyone after watching the SharePoint demo to say that Microsoft does have a winner in SharePoint 2010 although they do seem to have forgotten a few things.
Missing things tend to be small things that annoy when building sites and lists rather than large things that stops a coder delivering functionality… a typical example is the failure to provide a cascading Look-up field… which if you are not familiar would allow you to include a field in a SharePoint form that provides a drop down choice from another list within the same site. If it cascaded then you could select from one column say selecting a car manufacturer and then the second field provides a filtered view of a second column from the same list that displays the models from the selected supplier. We wanted it in MOSS2007 and frankly expected it in 20-10 but to date it has not appeared.
SharePoint 2010
New in this version of SharePoint
But there is some very cool stuff that will change the SharePoint landscape in development and information management. My Site does truly become a social sharing location with twitter (Microsoft call’s it Status) type fields and a Facebook-esk wall for people to add ‘business’ based comments. Tagging functionality is enabled across the whole enterprise that is searchable and attributable to the person placing the tag which is pretty cool as often finding information starts from knowing or understanding the role of colleagues (which is the term Microsoft use for ‘Friends’) and following their tags to obtain relevant information.
Beta release
Beta is due out in November with what appears to be a May 2010 planned RTM release. It is 64 bit only and there appears to be a lot of effort to show it running live on demonstrator’s laptops on Windows 7, which I have to say, is impressive and great for developers.
SharePoint automation
Developers will love the tools in Visual Studio 2010 and the Sandbox features which allow code to be uploaded to the site in a ring fenced environment ensuring that the code does not bring down a portal or screw up a site. The two big improvements demonstrated are the ability to have the code checked before upload and the automated upload process which seems to add code to the SharePoint page with a click of the Ribbon.
The ribbon
The new SharePoint 2010 experience is about the Ribbon which I am sure you know Microsoft takes seriously and I have to say works very well for all SharePoint 2010 users, content managers, power users and developers who can add and take away items from the ribbon as news apps are developed.
SharePoint metadata
Taxonomy management seems to be included, although to date I have not yet seen how this is controlled and implemented and Office products are linked into SharePoint ensuring that metadata is collected prior to saving and this includes picking from a drop down list of Centrally located Taxonomy items which I understand are available across sites, collections and portals, and training for this will be detailed in the SharePoint Tutorials included in our SharePoint Training Power Day Plus course.
Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010
For me the biggest thing was about Business Intelligence and the ability to set RSS feeds and direct links to excel service based Charts and tables allowing you to track updates to spreadsheets in real time if required. Also of course so you can include this chart in your document which is then automatically updated when the document is opened.
SharePoint online alternatives
Finally for this Blog, Scale was a big subject either in considering the need for Internet or Extranet sites or even small SharePoint Foundations (the new word for WSS) installation they appear to have things covered. …Including the ability to separate your enterprise portal across both your own hosted servers and the Cloud using Microsoft’s SharePoint On-line or alternatives.
Sorting SharePoint lists with over a 100 Million items
Day one was notable and I will not bore you with further details about the ability to track the busiest site, the most used page, the heaviest application, the ability to sort lists with over a 100 Million items in them… yes we saw a live demo where a list of over 100 Million items was filtered down to 3 Million in less than a second!!! Now that was impressive. You can see a video of the new SharePoint search in action here.
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Next Steps:
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