Twenty Ten - Sharepoint Conference Preview

I am really excited to share some of the information that I gathered so far in the Sharepoint Conference 2009. It’s been an amazing 5 days and the learning is just overwhelming and the very first thing that comes out of my mind is that 2010 upgrade will solve a lot of outstanding current customer issues right away. The sessions are tied to different tracks (Microsoft – Product techincal, MVP – product Technical, Partners – Session focused on different solutions developed on Sharepoint (on different space), Customers – Customer experience using Sharepoint).

Sharepoint 2010 Beta is going to be available to public in Nov 2009 and the actual release by mid of 2010. I tagged some of the information specific to the areas.

Great News - 2010 doesn't require an server OS. Win 7 works - Fantabulous

New things that come along with 2010 (All part of our volume license):

1. Great up-gradation to SharePoint Designer - FREE

2. FAST Search (Content Search, Profile search) – comes with 2010 Enterprise License - Though the session sucked as the guy from FAST was bragging his ass all along with the MS partnership than focussing on the actual content

3. Visual Studio 2010 – Completely 2010 Compliance, It comes with a lot of sharepoint project templates with greater integration to Office including teh webpart template (very usual for developers - webparts can be designed like an UC, finally they got this done).

4. Sharepoint Workspace – Comes with Sharepoint 2010 & this can be installed in users machine so that they can take all the sharepoint contents offline and can sync it later to the portal. This is I think one way of MS marketing to get the sharepoint workspace on every single user machine.

5. Sharepoint Foundation 2010 – Nothing but a fancy name to WSS V4

6. Sql Server Power Pivot For Sharepoint (SQL Server 2008 R2) – Reports from external

7. Performance Point integration with 2010 have mind blowing reports. The reports are ajaxified & it’s has a very nice UI. You should see it to appreciate this.

8. Sharepoint Online Cloud – Microsoft supports the Online hosting of sharepoint environments. This is specifically targeted for online websites like airlines, retail industries etc,

Some of the Issues/Features that we can solve/get right out of 2010 Release:

1. Built-In Spell Check -finally.
2. Cross Browser support for application.
3. 2010 is Ajaxified to a big extent.

4. Theming
5. Multi-Language support
6. Mobile support
7. Substantial Dialog improvements
8. Silver light support (Streaming Video is easier, I don't need to talk about this UI..you knw it)
9. Implementation of custom search is fast & easy (People, Content – Couple of millions of rows in seconds)
10. Performance is very good atleast in the demo’s
11. 2010 is very Scalable – no limitation on the list items (Million), Filter capabilities
12. Governance, Taxonomy is great
13. Visio Integration (Editable) - Workflows
14. In 2010, users can upload picture from their system, Can also upload Multiple Docs by drag & drop. Earlier it's a 2 step process, upload it to teh library and select teh image from there.
15. Sub-Folder creation for lists since it can handle only couple of 1000’s in 2007 (Now millions) & this feature is configurable in 2010 – 2007 had this limitation
16. Contract Documents Types (Content type)

17. The User logged-in Status is shown(Online, Busy, Chat)

18. Document Set – Tie a set of documents and let it go through certain workflow. I believe this is one of the best feature they have come up with.

Upgrading 2010 from 2007 ( a lot of details in there, I’ll update as and when I get some time):

1. 2010 requires a 64-Bit Processor
2. Upgrade is available from MOSS 2007 SP2 and the upgrade is very nicely planned and it even has a visual upgrades which is totally configurable. I am really thrilled with a lot of features that we have in the 2010 version.
3. Win 7/Vista Compatible
4. Visual Upgrade is another great feature where the user doesn’t know the upgrade until we turn it on.

Improved End User Experience:

1. New feature - Office look and feel (Ribbon)
2. New Feature - Tags
3. New Feature - Ratings
4. Improved Blogs
5. Stronger Office Integration – Excel/Powerpoint/Visio.
6. Navigation Improved & made easy

For the Developers:

1. Progress Reports (we would know the progress on what’s happening during the commandline) 2. Powershell – An alternate for ‘stsadm’ (Increasingly usable – major support by Microsoft)
3. Easy Integration of Info-path fom with sharepoint – Lists, web service
4. Infopath Form Debuging is easy, Info-Path webparts can be created in seconds
5. Package Info-path forms into a wsp and move it to another environment
6. Unique document Id for each document or a listitem in the libraries
7. SilverLight talking to sharepoint – Web Service, REST, Client Object Model, Rendering Data to Page
8. Fiddler can be used to debug
9. Map Control in SilverLight can be configured in the Sharepoint Lists so that the end points can be configured easily
10. Task Manager view, Tabs, Organizer on SilverLight integration gives rich UI

For n/w admins:

1. Virtualization of sharepoint 2010 can be doen through Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
2. Sql mirroring is easy to configure – Failover Database Server
3. Backup of a particular item is possible (Sharepoint Items)
4. Change Password automatically and notify the administrator (Service account)
5. From AD we could see all sharepoint installation (2008) - Governance