SharePoint Conference 2009 Opens

The big news of the day was that the public beta of SharePoint 2010 would begin in November. There's a lot to look forward to. The new SharePoint is a significant move in the right direction.

In the spirit of sharing information quickly, I'm posting my unedited personal notes from each of today's sessions. I apoligize for the length.

Keynote - Steve Ballmer

• Open beta of Office and SharePoint 2010 to begin in November. No specific date offered.
• Microsoft market SharePoint to the consumer market someday.
• SharePoint vision is to eliminate the need for dedicated search, ECM, BI, and social computing solutions.
• Key strategy changes for SharePoint: From end-user application to composite applications and Rapid Application Development; from on premise solutions to cloud-based computing; and from internal intranet sites to public Internet sites.
• New developer dashboard makes it easier to troubleshoot SharePoint sites.
  Deploy "sandbox solutions" to isolate developer coding.
• Over a million users are signed up for SharePoint Online.
• Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Ingersoll Rand were mentioned as SharePoint Online references.
• SharePoint Online supports "almost" all of the end-user functionality as the on-premise version.
• Use cases that may justify the cloud: Not wanting to build new infrastructure; needing to collaborate with an external partner.
• Pfizer, Ferrari, Kroger, Kraft, Volvo all use SharePoint for their public Internet sites.
• The new SharePoint Server for Internet Sites is licensed to make it cost effective to deploy public Internet sites.
• Cut and paste formatting fidelity between SharePoint and Office.
• Skinable, Sliverlight media player web part.
• Built-in link and spell checking.
• Query-less search leverages FAST Search Server 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Drilldown - Jeff Teper

• What makes SharePoint unique? Tight office integration, web based site design.
• SharePoint balances the developer, end-user, and administrator experiences.
• Big focus on improving usability: Ribbon UI, edit in place, AJAX, fewer page refreshes.
• Integrate Office online components with SharePoint.
• Richer blogs and wikis.
• Social tagging, folksonomy support.
• "We think of ourselves as pioneering enterprise social computing."
• SharePoint 2007 showed up on Gartner Magic Quadrant for first time, and “did well.” Expect that SharePoint 2010 will do even better.
• Support for millions of items in lists and libraries.
• Controls for managing taxonomy, both top-down and bottom-up. Define and enforce consistent content types and taxonomy across all SharePoint sites.
• Built in media streaming.
• Search improvements: Federation, relevancy, wildcards, thumnailing, inferences from people profiles and mailboxes.
• Powerful new data visualization features.
• Support for [[wiki link]] syntax outside of wiki.
• Upload images directly into the SharePoint editor. No need to upload to image library first.
• Ability to multi-select items.
• Create and manage document sets, which are groups of documents consolidated into a single work product.
• Note board is like the Facebook wall.
• Microsoft did usability testing of SharePoint Central Administration UI for first time ever.
• Rich PowerShell support. Over 500 commands will be shipped with public beta of SP2010.
• Improved admin reporting and analytics.
• New, streamlined upgrade model should protect existing sites, while allow control to enable new functionality when it makes sense.
• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is now called SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.
  

SharePoint 2010 Overview

• All SharePoint pages are now like wiki pages. They live in their own page library and can be edited in place.
• Edit list and library settings from ribbon menu.
• Apply PowerPoint themes to SharePoint sites. (Looks like the admin might have to add the theme file to sever before it shows up on the list of available themes.)
• SharePoint Communities are what Microsoft is labeling their social and collaboration tools.
• The "enterprise" wiki is built to resemble Wikipedia, and is more feature rich than their "standard" wiki. Includes table of contents, rating, templates, sections, categories, tagging.
• Tag, rate, and add notes to any item in SharePoint, when enabled.
• Any list/library may contain a managed keywords column that integrates with managed taxonomy service.
• My sites include "status", like the Facebook status. Other colleagues’ status messages will appear in the news feed on the My Network tab, if enabled.
• Tabbed My Site user interface.
• Access everything you have tagged, noted, commented, or rated from your My Site. All of these items also show up on the news feed.
• My Network tab displays the activities of your colleagues.
• Every site supports document routing now, not just Records Center.
• Create rules to route content based on tags. Users simply save to "drop off library." Pop-up provides URL to final location.
• Insert web parts within content, in line.
• Media streaming supports look-ahead and bit throttling. You can create an internal YouTube with out of the box functionality.
• Enhanced people search can mine email (Exchange only). Supports phonetic and wildcard search.
• Insert a tag cloud anywhere, even outside the site collection where the content is stored.
• SharePoint Insights refers to the SharePoint Business Intelligence features.
• Publish Access data to SharePoint, in other words, webify Access.
• Business Data Services (BDS) replaces the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Supports read/write.
• The data in SharePoint "external lists" live in backend data sources.
• SharePoint 210 Scalability: Terabytes of data with multi-million item lists.
• Microsoft.com/SharePoint is running SharePoint 2010.
  

Overview of Office 2010

• Striving for a consistent experience across PC, phone, and browser.
• Outlook: Mail thread mgmt (cleanup and ignore), Reply with meeting, "Backstage"
• Excel: Show little trend charts for each row of data. High fidelity between app and web published spreadsheet. Real-time co-authoring within web app embedded in SharePoint.
• The Note Board is like a wiki or discussion. Any document or list item can have an associated Note Board.
• "Backstage" is a feature available within each of the Office suite applications. It is accessible from the file menu. It contains all the information about the document, and is programmatically extensible to meet specific business needs.
• Open Word documents within SharePoint using the embedded Online Word applicatino. It is a rich editor, not just a reader.
• The rich Word application indicates who else is co-editing with you. Paragraph-level locking prevents save conflicts. Changes are queued up in the Upload Center. An indicator show when changes are pending and can be applied. Co-authoring eliminates the need to check-in/out.
• In-line image editing within Word, such as background removal.
• Word and PowerPoint support client-based co-authoring. Excel is browser-based co-authoring.
• OneNote supports both web and browser co-authoring. All co-authoring is enabled through SP2010.
• Awesome new PowerPoint transitions.
• Video editing within PowerPoint, for example color correction, trim, bookmark, special effects (reflection, frames).
• Embed internet video into PowerPoint.
• Ability to compress embedded media files in PowerPoint.
• Office is available in both 32- and 64-bit clients.
• Unless you're creating very large Excel files, there is probably no need for 64-bit version of Office, yet.

Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint

• Social computing lowers the cost of sharing and collaborating. It surfaces knowledge and networks, and increases employee engagement.
• SharePoint let you control the speed and breadth of your social computing deployment.
• Company demographics, hierarchy, policies, and culture skews the normal social computing patterns we observe on the Internet.
• The My Home tab is replaced by the My Content tab.
• New My Network tab shows you the blended news feed of your colleagues’ activities. This replaces the Colleague Tracker web part. It tracks for a lot more activities than SharePoint 2007. Appears to be more granular.
• Subscribe to a tag so that you get an update to your network news feed every time someone else in the company uses that tag.
• New "Ask me about" field on profile, which has higher relevance than tags in other profile fields.
• New organizational structure browser graphically illustrates employee, team members, manager, and direct reports. Requires Silverlight. There is an HTML version too.
• Store content on My Sites that doesn't fit in any team site. It is intuitive for people to look for documents in My Site. They seem to easily associate work products with their respective author.
• There is no evidence that memberships work differently or better than SP2007.
• Eliminated most ActiveX within SharePoint, and replaced it with AJAX, making the UI operations much smoother.
• It is really easy to add graphics to a blog.
• A SharePoint web page is a basic wiki; they just don't call it a wiki. They just want people to think of it as simply an easy way to edit a web page.
• The enterprise wiki is based on the publishing portal template. Embed web parts, such as libraries or video player within an enterprise wiki page.
• Apply records management and legal hold policies within social computing tools to content.
  Showed a custom developed "Join" button for a community site that adds a user to the list of site members.
• Showed custom thumbs up, thumbs down voting web part.
• Let me know if you need me to elaborate on any of these items.