Alex's blog

Attend Microsoft SharePoint Connections at the Amsterdam RAI Convention Centre, 18-19 January, 2010. Highlights of this two-day event include over 40 technical sessions. This conference will cover many of the existing announcements and highlights of the International SharePoint conference held in Las Vegas. Learn about the new capabilities in the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 now. The Microsoft SharePoint Connections conference also offers networking opportunities to engage with SharePoint industry partners who are exhibiting. Technical sessions will be delivered by known SharePoint experts from Europe and the USA.

For developers, SharePoint 2010:

• Offers big changes for SharePoint development on Windows 7
• You can now install SharePoint 2010 on a Windows Client
• Includes support for LINQ, JSON, REST, Silverlight, jQuery and more
• SharePoint 2010 becomes a true developer platform
• Works great with Visual Studio 2010. New visual designers and project templates have been added to Visual Studio to develop, debug and deploy your SharePoint applications
• Includes tighter integration between SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio and Visio
• Includes a sandbox solution
• Features great built-in workflow support

For IT professionals, SharePoint 2010:

• Includes tighter integration with Office 2010
• Supports SharePoint workspace client and Office web apps
• Deploys better for cloud solutions
• Allows new ways for small and large businesses to use SharePoint on the Internet using SharePoint Online
• Features a new Business Collaboration Platform that connect and empowers people

Some well-known speakers like Spencer Harbar, Mirjam van Olst, Marianne van Wanrooij, Donald Hessing, Daniel McPherson, Matthijs Hoekstra, Bart Wessels and others will be there!

This will also be a great oppertunity to meet and connect to all the SharePoint people in the Netherlands.

http://www.devconnections.com/

On technet some technical diagrams and posters are pre-released on SharePoint 2010. Many of these resources are visual representations of recommended solutions.

 They include poster-sized documents available in formats including Microsoft Office Visio 2007 files (.vsd), PDF files, and XPS files. You might need extra software to view these files. See the following table for information about opening these files.

 The following for SharePoint 2010:

• Services in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010
• Hosting Environments in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products
• Search Environment Planning for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Search Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Design Search Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Business Connectivity Services Model
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Planning
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Upgrade Approaches
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 — Test Your Upgrade Process
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 — Services Upgrade
• Getting started with business intelligence in SharePoint Server 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199(office.14).aspx

And the following for SharePoint Foundation 2010:

• Services in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Hosting Environments in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806874(office.14).aspx

The last two days i have been busy trying to get an environment up and running for SharePoint 2010 beta 2. It took me some time but finally succeeded today. This post is attended to provide you information about the installation and configuration based on failures of my side and some blog posts i found.

I’m not that fortunate to have an 64bit system which allows virtualisation. Therefore i had to install my environment directly on a partition of my harddrive. The advantage is of course that my environment is working as fast as possible. The downside is that duplicating this environment for development purposes is not possible.

Determine your hardware and software requirements here. The following steps are necessary to install SharePoint 2010 beta 2 on a Windows Server 2008 environment.

1) Install Windows Server 2008 Standard / Enterprise on your partition (or virtual environment when possible). Make sure that you got the latest updates (mostly hotfixes) ,Service Pack 2 and the Cumulative Update 2. Do not use Windows Server 2008 R2 because a certain hotfix (step 3) is not yet available.

2) SharePoint 2010 offers two types of installation named Stand-alone and Complete Farm. I strongly believe that your development environment should be identical to the test, acceptance and production environment, so we will lateron install the Farm installation. SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard expects for Complete Farm installation the usage of domain accounts only. There is a work-around for this which can be found here. I rather use a domain. So you need to add the role “Active Directory Domain Services” for this. After installation a restart is required. Execute the application dcpromo.exe through the command line to generate a domain. Use for example the name corp.contoso.local and uncheck the DNS service during installation. If everything goes ok your environment will restart with corp\administrator as account.

3) You will need to install a hotfix which provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. If you do not install this fix, you will get “Unrecognized attribute ‘allowInsecureTransport’” error in ULS log. Even worse, most of your service applications will not run properly. The fix can be found here.

4) Install Windows SQL Server 2008 Standard / Enterprise. Do not install the R2 version of SQL Server. This will cause that some functionality inside SharePoint will not work anymore.

5) Install the SharePoint Pre-Requisites using the SharePoint 2010 beta 2 installer or install all Pre-Requisites yourself. List of Pre-Requisites and explanation with screendumps can be found here.

6) Install SharePoint 2010 beta 2 and choose Complete Farm installation. At the end of the installation the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard starts up and will need some info to configure your environment. In my case create a new farm on localhost with the domain administrator account or another domain account because of security reasons. Finally go to “Configuration Wizards” in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration to setup your environment completly.

7) install other applications like Office 2010 beta 2, SharePoint Designer 2010 beta 2, Visual Studio Team System 2010 beta 2 and Visio 2010 beta 2.

A lot of my problems were resolved thanks to the blog post of Jie Li.

Have fun!

I was just surfing around when i got the feeling, lets check the MSDN subscriptions website. And yes… All betas 2 are released since this morning UTC time (meaning available now for us in Europe). The following betas are made available:

• SharePoint Designer 2010
• Office 2010
• Visio 2010
• SharePoint 2010

Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 was already released. So download all the iso’s from the MSDN subscriptions and start installing your system. Keep in mind that you will need a MSDN subscription to get those files.

Have fun!

SharePoint 2010 has evolved into a mature content management system. The previous version called MOSS 2007 delivered a content management system which was just not that extended in comparison with other content management products in the market. Still Microsoft delivered a useful Portal product what enables customers to setup environment quickly and easy with support for content management.

Today Microsoft is working on finalizing the SharePoint 2010 product which will be released as beta 2 this month. And I have to say that the SharePoint Team at Microsoft has spent some time on improving the user experience with content management.

SharePoint 2010 brings you a solution which enables you and your customers to setup different types of environments which are in need for content management. Think of using it for blogging, internet facing websites, division and company portals, enterprise Wikis but also document and record management centers.

Author and Compose, Brand, Control and Unified platform

There are four main areas which have been focused on. The first one is “Author and Compose” which allows users to create rich web pages with digital media using a familiar user experience. Secondly “Brand”. This area delivered some big problems in previous versions. Microsoft is well known for its generation of non compliance HTML causing a lot of problems when trying to style internet facing websites. With the release of SharePoint 2010 the experience with branding is certainly improved with a set of rich tools and capabilities. The third area is “Control” and gains insight into your website with workflow and reporting capabilities. The fourth and last area is “Unified platform” for team, division, intranet, extranet and internet facing websites.

So what has been improved in SharePoint 2010?

• Standards and Accessibility
  SharePoint 2010 has been improved dramatically. The say that they are fully XHTML complaint and WCAG 2.0 AA Level compliant. Looking at the Alpha and Beta 1 version of the product there are still tables used for non-tabled data like the search box. But it is a major improvement and with Beta 2 it will be complaint. Secondly SharePoint Designer 2010 has been improved and delivers an enhanced tool for power users to change pages based on standards and accessibility.
• Less Clicks
  this is a major improvement. One of the biggest problems in previous versions was switching to application pages as soon as some data needed to be altered. Customers got lost and didn’t know how to get back. The user experience was really bad. With SharePoint 2010 the focus has been placed on as less clicks as possible and if possible to stay in the same context of the page. Meaning that the user experiences the same context when changing items in a list or changing the content of the page. You are only switched to an application page when you click through on a list, or when you go into site settings.
• Data in lists
  if you talk about content in SharePoint 2010 it is most likely stored in a list. Even the static content like publishing fields on pages is stored in columns of a list item. Secondly content of other systems is exposed in SharePoint by using external lists. These external lists enables users to simply view, edit, update or delete content from external sources. The new version of SharePoint supports large lists for storing data, indexing of columns (which can be set by the power user simply through list settings) and simplified views for displaying data. Keep in mind that using large lists in SharePoint is not a best practice. So don’t try to migrate a file-based system one on one into a SharePoint list.
• Full support of workflow
  I’m still not convinced of the out-of-the-box delivered workflow in SharePoint 2010. But with the changes made in Visio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS2010 a broad set of tools is delivered to power users and developers to design, create and develop workflows for SharePoint. Visio 2010 lets power users create workflows which can be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010. SharePoint Designer 2010 lets power users and developers to create even more sophisticated workflows than in the previous version. These workflows can be attached at a single list, multiple lists, Content Types and sites. There is even the possibility for reusable workflows.
• Multilingual support
  the interface of SharePoint 2010 will support multilingual by allowing users to switch languages in runtime. This means that most things like navigation, menus and other out-of-the-box components will change. Custom Web Parts and data from lists will not change.
• Web analytics
  SharePoint 2010 reporting and analytics have been improved in comparison with previous versions. You are able to analyze visitor behavior and even search query behavior. E.g. it is even possible to set an alert on faulty queries.
• Improved Search
  Search has been there from the beginning. A simple version in WSS and advanced / people search in MOSS 2007. This was one of the areas which I was not expecting that much from SharePoint. Mostly due to the fact they bought FAST ESP to deliver an enterprise search product. But in contract to my expectations there have been major improvements to search in SharePoint 2010. Some functionality is excellent OOB relevance, Federated results, metadata based refiners, query suggestions like “Did you mean?” and related searches, view in browser, people search, phonetic & nickname matching, social behavior improvements on relevance, self-search, keyword mining, expertise and profile search and more.

So what is new in SharePoint 2010?

There has been made a lot of changes in SharePoint 2010 in contrast with content management. Some of them are listed below.

• Rich Authoring
  one of the great new features is the way how power users are editing pages in their environment. It is called rich authoring. Rich authoring in SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to change content in a kind of Word-like environment. Changing settings directly reflect the content which is in editing. The environment supports all settings through “Ribbon” style toolbars just like in Office 2007 which enables users to change zones, Web Parts and components in an easy way.
• Digital Media
  As you all may know, digital media was not something pretty in previous SharePoint versions. But with the release of SharePoint 2010 inserting images into your page becomes easy. Normally you had to upload your images and linking them into your page by in most cases copying the URL. Now uploading the image to the right library and displaying it on the page is one action. The settings of images are extended and when in edit mode even real-time sizing of the image is possible by dragging the corners of the image with your mouse. With SharePoint 2010 support for streaming video (without the installation of software) is part of your environment. The video can be streamed from an internet location, file-based location and even directly from one of your libraries.
• Enterprise Wiki support anywhere
  With SharePoint 2010 sites are approached in a different way as previous versions. Each site is seen as a collection of pages. Each page supports Wiki style. What does it mean? When typing two brackets in your page will pop up a search box and list containing available pages and lists to which you can link from your content location.
• Data view mapping
  not all your content is stored in SharePoint. For most companies content is stored in legacy systems, databases, file-based systems and third-party products like SAP and Live Link. SharePoint 2010 offers an improved Business Connectivity services which allows you to expose external data into your SharePoint environment. Secondly the external list is introduced to expose data like standard lists in SharePoint. The power user or developer acts like it is a list in SharePoint while the data does not reside there. It is possible to view, add, update and delete items. This creates a unified editing experience to your users in SharePoint. A big advantage is that not even one single line of code is needed to create an external list on a SQL Server database which proves how easy the usage of Business Connectivity Services and external lists has become.
• Managed metadata
  Metadata is something completely new in SharePoint 2010. In previous versions normally a column was defined which contained the metadata tags. In SharePoint 2010 you are able to create hierarchical metadata structures. These structures can be used cross farms which enable you to create a base set of metadata inside your organization. Different divisions can reuse that set of base data and based on their governance add, change or replace tags. A new type of column is introduced to connect these tags to your content. Selecting tags from that structure is done through tree-like controls. Secondly connecting lists enables the power user to expose other columns next to the connected column. E.g. customer list is connected to a country list by its id. The power user has the ability to select other columns like name of country, number of habitants and other columns which will be shown in the list of customers. These columns are treated like own columns, but the data is part of the other list.
• Social Support
  SharePoint 2010 got some enhancements which contribute to social support. It seems the guys from Microsoft have been looking at other products and took the best of it and implemented it into SharePoint 2010. To my opinion this is a big improvement, but still other tools are more sophisticated. Socializing is mostly visible through the fact that any item, even in document management, has the ability to become rated by visitors. These ratings are used for example in search results. Secondly the My Site environment got some major improvements. Mostly based on copying functionality from existing tools like Facebook.  In previous versions you had the public / private views. Now you are able to create more than those two views. Actions performed by users are visible in some kind of time stream on their My Site page. Other users can follow them and see what they are up to. This could be a rating action, changing a document or just leaving a message on their My Site telling to the crowd what they are currently doing.  It is possible to see where you stand inside your organization and what your relation is to other colleagues. This is presented in some cool Silverlight application.

Hopefully this will give you some idea and understanding over the improvements and new functionality around content management in SharePoint 2010.