20 Oct 2009
SharePoint 2010, an improved and powerful platform for more than only Collaboration
Today was the first day at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. The keynotes were opened by Steve Balmer and Jeff Teper.SharePoint 2010 is going to bring us an incredible improved user experience, scalability, social media, BI and connectivity with the Office 2010 client product. Just to give you all some insight feature information to bring you all up-to-date with this new and improved platform.
One of the great things is user experience. The editor has been improved and provisioned with the all known ribbon from Office 2010. Editing text on a page is made that easy as if you were using Word. Also adding, changing and resizing images is great. SharePoint 2010 takes care of the location for storage and connect the image to the page in one single flow with a few clicks. Using Silverlight has been improved and is even used inside the new environment. Examples are people search which shows the connections between users by using Silverlight. Streaming video (have seen a demo which did at least 50MB video and 1.5Mbs) is almost unreal. The video starts playing without any additional drivers and codecs installed and runs smoothly. Even dragging to another start point in the video goes smoothly.
As you all know, creating a page in MOSS 2007 expected from you to select a specific template which holds the layout and zones to place the Web Parts in. With SharePoint 2010 you are able to change the layout at runtime whenever you want. Problems with pages published without somebody checking the language? SharePoint 2010 does it for you. As soon as you want to publish the page is checked on spelling mistakes.
Another great option is the development bar. This bar is added under at the page and shows the loading time of the different parts of the pages and the duration of the SQL server stored procedure calls from SharePoint to SQL. This gives the IT Pro the advantage to quickly find problems in SharePoint pages and act accordingly.
Jeff Teper took us back to 1999 where Bill Gates defined the vision and strategy of the product. Comparing that vision and strategy to where we stand now it is still the same. He talked about Great Integrated Solution, out-of-the-box Workspace, Compelling Office integration and Easy and flexible deployment. With other words, the vision and strategy for this product is standing strong. He talked about the parts of the new circle of SharePoint 2010, namely SharePoint Sites, SharePoint Communities, SharePoint Search, SharePoint Insights and SharePoint Composites. Below some of the things discussed:
• SharePoint Sites
The new ribbon, Easy usage, reaching of x-browsers, MUI, Accessibility. Easier to maintain pages as they were rich text, Improvements on lists like checking multiple files, more scalability due to the support for more than a million items. SharePoint workspaces in the Office 2010 client tools, Support for mobile, changing languages of sites real time, AJAX and Office client and web application support.
The new ribbon, Easy usage, reaching of x-browsers, MUI, Accessibility. Easier to maintain pages as they were rich text, Improvements on lists like checking multiple files, more scalability due to the support for more than a million items. SharePoint workspaces in the Office 2010 client tools, Support for mobile, changing languages of sites real time, AJAX and Office client and web application support.
• SharePoint Communities
Collaboration by using Wiki, blogs, co-auth, organizing by tagging, rating and bookmarks, My sites have smart profiles, feeds, browse colleagues, experts and organizations. People search with support of Silverlight.
Collaboration by using Wiki, blogs, co-auth, organizing by tagging, rating and bookmarks, My sites have smart profiles, feeds, browse colleagues, experts and organizations. People search with support of Silverlight.
• SharePoint Content
Scaling up and out, taxanomy, workflow, document stats, digital asset management, architecture can now hold more data in listings, search improvements due to the high scalability, governance due to policy and record management, possible of defining content types for tagging cross sites, web applications and even farms. Streaming video through Silverlight while movie is stored in SharePoint list.
Scaling up and out, taxanomy, workflow, document stats, digital asset management, architecture can now hold more data in listings, search improvements due to the high scalability, governance due to policy and record management, possible of defining content types for tagging cross sites, web applications and even farms. Streaming video through Silverlight while movie is stored in SharePoint list.
• SharePoint Search
Standard Search (which is greatly improved due to scalability, speed, categorizing and more) and FAST ESP Search support, better experience, relevance, navigation in search. Unified set of connectors, wild card queries, federated search, using Office web applications to preview search results inside the results page, people search (also working with misspelled names), flexible platform, 100 million row search possible
Standard Search (which is greatly improved due to scalability, speed, categorizing and more) and FAST ESP Search support, better experience, relevance, navigation in search. Unified set of connectors, wild card queries, federated search, using Office web applications to preview search results inside the results page, people search (also working with misspelled names), flexible platform, 100 million row search possible
• SharePoint Insights
Excel Services having central management on the server, new interaction and experiences, Chart Types, tables, live feeds of Excel on your blog is possible, SQL Server Support, Performance Point Services integration in SharePoint. Visio Services and Chart Web Parts, Business Connectivity Services, SQL Server Power-Pivot (Also called Gemini) lets users go through massive amounts of data.
