SharePoint 2010 First Impressions

I’m back from the Microsoft SharePoint 2009 Conference, where Microsoft took the wraps off SharePoint 2010 (SPS), the long-awaited successor to Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS)

Big Blue has been very quiet about this release. I attended the only public session on the new software in July at the Worldwide Partner Conference. While we were involved in the early Technical Preview program and had access to all the software, we were unable to speak about the software privately or publicly until now.

Why all the secrecy? To ensure the success of this product, Microsoft has been building support and training avenues prior to its release, involving its partners early in product development, with the ultimate idea being to ensure the public’s first impressions becomes a lasting, good experience.

Was it worth the wait?

Yes!

When SPS 2010 (dropping the Microsoft Office moniker) and the rest of the Office 2010 wave hits public release, it will have been four years since the last release, and the development teams have been hard at work. Let me just say from the outset – based on what I saw in the Technical Preview, and now from the conference in Las Vegas – you won’t be disappointed.

This article’s too short to expound on each highlight.

In coming months, we will write, blog (www.cdhtalkstech.com -- David Tappan already has two detailed blogs and Doug Brower has one) and present information on them – stay tuned and visit us frequently for more information. We would be happy to hold a personalized lunch-n-learn or partially underwritten PoC on SPS 2010 with you.

But here are the major advancements, as I see them, and in no particular order:

• Standards Compliance and Accessibility: SharePoint 2010 fully adheres to XHTML and WCAG 2.0 AA. SharePoint 2010 looks and acts the same in Safari, FireFox and on an iPhone as in Internet Explorer. True browser freedom!
• Ribbon UI: Many of us have adapted to the ribbon interface of Office 2007, finding it productive. That interface is now used throughout SharePoint 2010.
• Performance: With AJAX everywhere in the interface, round trips to the server are eliminated, resulting in instant user feedback and quicker rendering. Performance benefits from new offline caching technologies (ODC – Office Document Cache) and protocols (FSSHTTP – File Synchronization via SOAP over HTTP) for documents and list items. Search performance is improved by segmenting the indexes into partitions and load balancing across query servers.
• Web 2.0: In some respects, SharePoint 2003 preceded sites like Facebook and MySpace with SPS 2003 MySites. Some additional Web 2.0 features found their way into SharePoint 2007 with wikis and blogs, but the Web 2.0 movement far outstripped SharePoint 2007 capabilities. SPS 2010 catches up with Web 2.0 features, and brings businesses into Web 2.0 in a powerful way, increasing productivity and collaboration by exposing information and internal experts. SPS 2010 MySites gets a "facelift" with greatly improved blog and wikis and added user-facilitated tagging, known as "folksonomy." All information can be rated and tagged by users, and tag clouds can expose that tagging to portal users.
• Business Insights: Known widely as Business Intelligence (BI), Microsoft has improved the product with innovative technologies like PowerPivot , with an"on-the-fly" analysis cube of data in Excel with hundreds of millions of rows. PerformancePoint is fully integrated into SharePoint as an ECAL license, and boasts many new features. Excel Services enhancements allow spreadsheets to reside anywhere in a SharePoint library, including UNC file shares.
• Web-Based Office Viewing and Editing: You now have the ability to click on an Office document in SharePoint and open it in any browser -- without having the Office application. You can edit the application in the browser, but with the familiar ribbon.

I’d be happy to cover all the new features and compelling reasons to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 with you. If you are now using a previous version of SharePoint, I strongly suggest you begin a limited deployment of 2010 in Beta, coming in November, to begin your SharePoint journey. We would be happy to help you explore, while helping you to avoid pitfalls.