SharePoint Conference 2009 Wrap-up

The show is over, but the adventure is only beginning. As stated before, SPC09 in Las Vegas was the coming out party for SharePoint 2010. While we will still have to wait a few weeks for stable bits to play with, over 7000 attendees came away with a treasure trove of knowledge and documentation.

In my previous installments, I talked about the venue, the atmosphere, and the keynotes. I've also touched on some of the new Office integration story.

Of course, the star of the show was SharePoint 2010 itself. So, I'm going to dedicate the rest of this post to a punch-list of changes/improvements. I know I've missed a few (or more than a few) new elements, or misunderstood a detail or two, but even so the list is impressive. You'll see that the SharePoint team at Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels during the three years we've been waiting. Over the next few months, I'll fill in more details on the individual features, correct what I got wrong, or update you on the inevitable feature changes as things get closer to release.

The Basics

It seems Microsoft can't release a new version of SharePoint without tweaking the names a bit. Just as "SharePoint Portal Server" and "SharePoint Team Services" became "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)" and "Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)" in the 2007/3.0 wave, For 2010/4.0, they're simply called "SharePoint Server" and "SharePoint Foundation" respectively.

The Public Beta of SharePoint 2010 is to be released in November 2009.

The actual product release is planned for the first half of 2010.

It is still "SharePoint". Although many weaknesses have been addressed, core functionality remains essentially similar, with lists, libraries, site model, etc... Since "form follows function", many of the visual elements will be very familiar.

Infrastructure and Administration

• Requires 64bit throughout the stack
• Windows Server 2008 as a baseline OS
• Complete redesign of Central Admin
• Shared Services: No more monolithic "Shared Services Provider". Instead things formerly grouped under an SSP are individual Shared Service Applications.
• Search architecture changes: index role can be spread across multiple servers
• "Normal" SharePoint search now scale-tested to around 100 million items.
• Business Data Catalog transformed into Business Connectivity Services, and becomes part of SharePoint Foundation (no more enterprise CAL required).
• BCS info becomes available throughout the Office 2010 suite, not just SharePoint, and offers read/write capability.
• FAST Search is available as an add-on for Enterprise CAL users at per-server pricing.
• Enterprise-wide metadata support
• Lists are more scalable, and can be "external" to the SharePoint content database. Admin can set maximum returned items to prevent bogging the system down.
• Servers can be upgraded without enabling the new UI by default. Site owners can then switch over when their members are ready for the change.
• AD Group Policies can prevent installation of SharePoint on unapproved systems.
• Even more databases.
• Better auditing and reporting in-box.
• "License" logging to see which features are used.
• Allowed to read log/report database to build custom reports.

Client Facing

• UI: No IE6 support for collaboration/team sites. Can still make IE6 friendly publishing sites.
• Firefox 3.x is a Level 1 browser.
• "Accessible" CSS-based layouts, and XSLT-based list views.
• Table-based layouts are gone
• Cleaner, modernized themes.
• Ribbons are primary control mechanism, just like Office.
• There is no longer a separate basic "Wiki" site type in SharePoint Foundation. (However, there is now a publishing-based "Enterprise Wiki" site in SharePoint Server.)
• All team sites can have wiki functionality enabled, and made the default.
• Theme colors can be imported from PowerPoint themes for compliance with corporate standards.
• The GroupBoard template is available out of the box.
• List lookups can pull multiple fields
• List lookups support referential integrity (blocking/cascading deletes)
• Field validation

Social

• Major overhaul of profiles and My Sites.
• Includes "status" functionality (i.e. FaceBook/Twitter style updates)
• Unique org-chart presentation
• "Folksonomy" to support user-created shared tags in addition to Enterprise "Taxonomy" metadata.
• Can tag non-SharePoint content

Search (Standard)

• Improved handling of metadata
• Faceting (now called "refinement") is built-in
• Social input to ranking

Search (FAST)

• All standard SP Search features
• Deep refinement (polls entire result set to get actual counts)
• Concept metadata from unstructured content
• User-role tailored result sets.
• Massive scalability
• Superset of standard SP Search API
• Managed through the same admin UI

SharePoint Designer 2010

• Complete UI redesign, based on SharePoint "artifacts" rather than file structure.
• SPD 2010 tied to SP 2010. Will not work on older versions or non-SharePoint sites, and old SPD won’t work against SP 2010 sites.
• Much better Visual Studio integration – exports Solutions that can be imported into VS for both site designs and workflows.
• SPD Workflows can be independent of specific lists.
• SPD Workflows can easily be exported into either Visio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010
• Finer administrative control over what SPD users can do.
• Page model is the same, but many changes based on new CSS layouts and Theme engine.

Development

• The "platform" aspect of SharePoint receives a lot of emphasis with this version
• Use Visual Studio 2010 for full visual web part design and other SharePoint integration points
• Can install SharePoint on a client OS (Vista or Windows 7, 64-bit) for dev sandbox.
• Much better developer documentation out of the gate
• Client Side object model to make Silverlight controls and web parts easier to develop.
• REST, ATOM, and other web service interfaces fully supported.

Conclusion

In his keynote and his write-up from a couple weeks ago, Jeff Teper pointed out that the vision and purpose of SharePoint hasn't really changed much from the original 1-page proposal over 10 years ago. Yet the implementation of that vision has grown by leaps and bounds over the succeeding versions. I hope I have shown you that SharePoint 2010 will continue in that tradition. As I said earlier, I'm sure I've missed things. These were just the elements that stuck out as I was going through sessions and reading material. But I have to admit, I'm excited.