October 2009 - Posts
The last day of the SPC had some tech-laden sessions hosted by Andrew Connell. The first was about migrating from 2007 to 2010, and how you can add the nice 2010 development features (like the ribbon and the developer dashboard) back into your 2007 master pages when you migrate them. The theme seems to be that you invested in branding and customizing 2007, and Microsoft is making it straightforward to move that content to 2010. The idea is to not have to stop doing work in your 2007 instance waiting for 2010 to release. All in all, it looks like going from 2007 to 2010 should be much easier than 2003 to 2007.
Andrew’s second session was on the ability to create Service Applications. When I first heard it described (local versus proxy execution, service discovery, etc) I started having flashbacks to an app we built back in 1998 in C++ – the Bridge Pattern and CORBA live again! The more I heard the more I was impressed with what had been implemented. It is CORBA-like, but seems to be much easier to use/administer and much faster. Still some hand-rolling of code to bind things together, but all in all some powerful capability if you need it. Who might need it? I can see an ISV who wants to embed some of their product’s capabilities into SharePoint where there are long-running operations or a need for horizontal scalability of compute-intensive operations. There is a decent amount of development overhead to do so, but it’s nice to know the capability is there if needed. One Best Practice mentioned – if you do decide to create a Service Application, make sure to create the Central Admin and PowerShell interfaces to make administration straightforward.
The conference was a great time and was very informative. A few themes
- I noticed a lot of people from other countries at the conference – SharePoint is definitely catching on worldwide and is standing up to the multi-lingual challenge.
- Microsoft decided to build on the good ideas of Excel Services in 2007 and make it super easy and powerful to do basic BI in Excel Services 2010
- The success of Excel Services in 2007 has borne Access Services and Visio Services in 2010. My instincts say that Access Services will be much more popular – making it much easier to take a departmental application and “upsize” it to the enterprise
- The sheer size of the conference was an indicator of how huge the product has become, and how much customers and Microsoft are betting on the platform.
Our next steps will be to update our webinars to show some of the new 2010 features and how they relate to the existing features, and to try everything out in the Beta release next month. Looking forward to it!
First let me apologize for the lack of blogging for a while. We have been under the gun with a sizable SharePoint development project. I have gown farther down into the innards of InfoPath then I ever thought possible. To give you an idea, we worked over 140 hours in the 2 weeks prior to the conference. I promise to be better, and now I have good reason to do so:
We at Syrinx just got back from a long week loaded with sessions, booths, experts, and information all about SharePoint 2010. All I can say is *WOW*. I predict the trend of SharePoint adoption to continue to to climb at an alarming rate.
I'm sure everyone is out there blogging about all the new features, and that's great! I'm just going to run down the high-level features from the sessions I attended and information I gathered. This is no way an exhaustive list, but as I dig into the new capabilities I will blog about them.
SharePoint Online / Sandbox Development and Testing
SharePoint 2010 will be offered in a software-as-a-service mode with WILL allow custom coding via a sandbox mode that runs in a protected state.
Business Connectivity Services
The evolution of the BDC is bi-directional and uses entities for direct connectivity with LOB applications / databases.
REST
This was one of the coolest features added to SharePoint due to the addition of WCF. SharePoint content can be quickly accessed via simple HTTP and it will return XML or JSON. This could prove very interesting.
Office 2010 real-time collaboration
Office 2010 fully supports real-time collaboration with robust features to sync and protect data while allowing users to work together on documents at the same time.
SharePoint Workspace
Gone is Groove, and here comes SharePoint Workspace. You export whole sites and all their content onto your desktop, see changes, sync versions, etc.
Visio Services
Bring your Visio diagrams to the web and treat the elements as assets in code allowing you attach business logic to these diagrams to visualize LOB data in diagrams in real-time.
Access Services
Create entire applications in access and "convert" them to SharePoint web applications with simple synchronization.
RIP Shared Service Provider
Now we have Service Applications that are independent and available to any web applications and even to other farms!
Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Support
New project types and deployment options are going to make this a lot easier for developers.
SharePoint Designer 2010 and much improved workflow
SPD 2010 was overhauled. Amongst other things is the ability to build reusable workflows, export them into Visual Studio, and package them as WSPs for deployment.
Windows 7 and Vista Development Supported
Now you can develop on workstation-grade operating systems.
FAST Search Integration
FAST is now fully embedded into SharePoint as an optional upgrade. And it is AWESOME!
I will try to explore and blog about each of these in detail as I test, play, and learn from the beta releases of SharePoint 2010 in the coming months!
It was a great conference and I am truly excited about what is to come!
-Ryan
Highlights from the day
Steve Walker and Joe Indelicato (of Chevron, Joe formerly of the Houston Texans) put on a good presentation about using BI in both cases to improve the business. At the Texans, Joe pioneered using Microsoft technologies to data mine and exploit weakness in other teams. Joe discovered statistical trends in which plays were most likely to be called, and tendencies of players that had the lowest aptitude test scores in Combine (run plays with motion straight at them – they’re more likely to get confused and falter). At Chevron, they are using BI and geospatial dashboards to surface information about the performance of wells and actions that need to be taken on them.
Kraft detailed their migration of 270+ consumer-facing web sites to SharePoint. The case study available on Microsoft.com was detailed – a $2.2M cost savings by moving the sites to SharePoint, while providing a flexible architecture to support unique branding and creative control of each product’s web page. The combined sites have 100M page views per month, with several billion and 100M dollar brands to support, and 98,000 employees as well as external ad agencies who want control. The migration plan demanded that creative efforts were separated from data processing. An architecture leveraging XML, XSL, CSS, Web Parts, and a clever automated packaging and promotion scheme fit the bill. Rollback capability was provided by checking current pages into a document library before promoting new pages. Case study: Available at microsoft.com
Two folks from Microsoft detailed their migration of an internal application for “After the fact Purchase Order” (ATFPO) approval from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Many of the items they had to roll by hand to create a security trimmed view of ATFPO’s for users in 2007 were now available off the shelf in 2010 using BCS. They were able to remove many of the “moving parts” from their solution, shrinking development time from 480 to 80 hours, and lines of code from 2763 to 446! As we saw clients leveraging SharePoint 2007 to speed up development cycles for LOB applications over traditional ASP.NET, I believe we’ll see the trend increase exponentially with SharePoint 2010.
Jones Lang Lasalle has bet on SharePoint in a big way, using the platform to support their rapidly-growing company. Leveraging MOSS 2007, they were able to capture web leads for the first time (0 – 5000 in the first year), increase the usage of their research downloads four times, and invert their development/maintenance resource allocation from 30%/70% to 70%/30% respectively. Their array of hundreds of sites and several different languages to support (as well as metric/English measurement and other localization considerations) made MOSS the obvious choice. They are currently looking at upgrading to SharePoint 2010, and as one of the larger SharePoint 2007 installations, they provided some interesting data on their pre-upgrade check. Almost all of their current features migrated with little to no intervention, which bodes well for companies considering the move to 2010. Case study: Available at microsoft.com
There were more in-depth info on SharePoint features and client stories, as well as analyst views on Day 2. Booz Allen Hamilton had a great story about their intranet’s social networking features, and how they drove adoption in a conservative environment where such ideas might normally be resisted. BAH used FAST Search, SharePoint, and some home grown solutions to provide a portal where people could post their availability for projects and managers in need of resources could find out about them, their reporting structure, and skills. They showed off a neat org chart tool that allowed you to dynamically browse groups and reporting relationships. Most of their organization was from tagging, and they let people show a little character in the portal in interests (like gardening, reading, golf, etc). They believe that this helps add a more rounded, human side to the profiles, and also helps suggest groups to form within the organization.
Bamboo Solutions showcased the new project management features in 2010 and in their product Project Management Central, with the help of Dax Sy and Julie Auletta. The combined feature set coupled with SharePoint 2010’s extensibility begs the question – is there anything that full-blown MS Project Server can provide that this solution does not? Portfolio management at the top, tasks, dependencies, updating percent complete on tasks, integration with desktop MS Project, creating dashboards, and alert emails you can format for milestones. I’m going to investigate this more, as many of our clients are interested in solutions like this and have shied away from full-blown MS Project Server thus far.
The session with Forrester on custom development in SharePoint was interesting. Their basic thesis – decide how much you want to get involved in SharePoint and go in with your eyes open. Do you consider SharePoint an application? An app plus “it runs our intranet”? Or do you consider SharePoint an enterprise application and integration platform? If you want to get into advanced projects, realize they are advanced and require a full-strength commitment of resources for development, testing, QA, deployment, and maintenance as any other enterprise application would. Many cases where people were unhappy with SharePoint seemed to stem from starting out with treating it as an application, then wanting to use it for more advanced projects while still wanting to treat it as “just an application” and not a development platform.
Other important ideas:
SharePoint is being extended in 2010 to allow you to leave current systems in place and have a “single source of truth” (SSOT) that you can surface through the portal, with optional read/write capability. This is a small refinement to the existing BDC but an important idea in that you can leave the data where it lives (PeopleSoft, SAP, SQL Server, etc) and not have to replicate it to SharePoint to expose it. This allows you to make SharePoint the “one stop shopping” portal for information in the company without a lot of expensive integration.
SSOT is expanded further with the REST-ful implementation of items like charts in SharePoint 2010. Common use case: There is a chart showing sales for the past four quarters, and a projection of the next two quarters. This chart lives in Excel, gets emailed around the company, and is copied into dashboards, PowerPoint, etc. What happens when the data in the Excel spreadsheet is updated and the chart changes? There is no way to know how many other places the chart has been copied, so stale data is inevitable. In 2010, you can move the data online and publish the chart in SharePoint to a known URL, and link the other items to this URL. Any changes will be picked up by the downstream consumers when the chart changes. The usual alerts and notifications can also be enabled to know when the chart changes.
Speed and Usability – don’t forget about them! In the session with Electronic Arts, they talked about the importance of responsive systems that share information efficiently. They advocated using Firebug and ySlow on your web apps to help figure out where performance can be improved. Their SharePoint implementation removed much of the default JS/CSS in pages in favor of a lightweight style definition (just 32 lines of CSS and 12 images to create a “skin”). They also cited Jakob Nielson’s “F-Theory”, that people scan and read things in a pattern similar to the capital letter F. The implication for SharePoint page layout is to create your web parts and then try a two or three column layout approach putting the most important items in the top left, top right, and middle left.
Syrinx is here in force at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, NV. The Mandalay Bay is packed with over 6,000 people attending the conference from all over the world. The morning was spent in a keynote with Steve Ballmer and a demo of the new SharePoint 2010 capabilities. Highlights for those that cannot be here:
- SharePoint 2010 Beta release scheduled for next month (November 2009)
- Final release sometime in H1 2010
- Windows 7 and Vista will be supported for developer platforms, and there is a developer dashboard built in that helps with profiling code. Downside: New developer tools are designed to work with 2010 only, not MOSS 2007.
- SharePoint Server is 64 bit only
- Better cloud support, allow uploading code and customizing SharePoint Online, and to mix and match cloud and “on premises” installs
- Many more SKU’s in this release, four quadrants of products based on Intranet/Internet and cloud/on premises
- Great demo’s of Access Services, Visio Services, SharePoint Workspaces (the new ‘Groove” for working disconnected), FAST Search, BCS (the new BDC – now with read/write capabilities and auto-generated CRUD operations for back-end LOB systems), PowerPivot (super Excel – handle 100M rows in one spreadsheet QUICKLY), co-editing of documents by more than one user at a time, “Insights’ the new PerformancePoint
- Scalability – 1M+ items in a list/folder, 10M+ in a document library, 100’s of millions across a farm.
- Better ability to create taxonomy or informal tagging to build a “folksonomy”
- PowerShell admin ability with 500+ commandlets shipped at release
- “Visual Upgrade” to run your 2007 to 2010 migration and allow users to cut over on a page by page basis as they are ready (Unanswered question – does this just apply to look and feel/chrome or does this affect web parts, etc? What don’t you see if you do not turn on the 2010 version?)
- Streaming video is supported – make your own “ShareTube” and control bandwidth, allow lookahead, etc.
- Better deployment capabilities, including the ability to build a solution in SharePoint Designer and have it move to different lists/libraries, or to upsize it to be worked on in Visual Studio.
Some General SharePoint product differentiators and customer feedback were mentioned
- Customers are responding very well to a platform that allows them to solve so many needs – there really is not a competing product that does everything SharePoint does or gives you the value it does
- SharePoint is cost effective by saving money three ways – less for licensing than trying to assemble several other competing products to do the same things, less to implement as it gives you so much out of the box, less to maintain and support as you have one platform to cover the many needs and one admin/developer skill set
- Favorite first projects: Intranets, Dashboards, Project Management portals, IT Service portals, moving paper-based LOB systems online, Content Management
- Microsoft is betting on the platform in a big way. Customers are as well. Great sessions from clients Tyson Foods and Global Crossing on their early SharePoint 2010 experiences. The Office integration done by Tyson to solve real LOB issues was exceptionally impressive.