SharePoint 2010 – Sneak Peek!

Cat is finally peeking out of the hat!

SharePoint 2010 “sneak peek” is finally available publicly. Just finished watching the videos. Tom Rizzo gives a nice sneak peek overview:

Overview

  1. Ribbons in browser with SharePoint. They are contextual, and can be changed. In-browser Editing everywhere, and heavy use of Wiki backbone is evident on UI/web-part pages! Silverlight web-part is now available, just link to Silverlight source.
  2. Rich theming support. Inherit themes from Office docs. Quickly change the look-and-feel of your site based on Office theme. Multiple browser support, including mobile experience!
  3. Visio Services: Introduction of Visio Services. Great browser experience for Visio docs, including dynamic updates for docs connected to external data.
  4. SharePoint Designer: Better UI, greater functionality! Enhancements to workflows, modelling and content-type management. Also now you can work with LoB Entities right in the client.
  5. Business Connectivity Services: (“evolution” of Business Data Catalog) Connect LoB apps, services and data to your UI and PS solutions. Great use case shown where you quickly build UI, for your data.
  6. Rich Media is seemingly everywhere with Silverlight, great Office client support, and for example quick video editing in PowerPoint. Much more to come on this one…

IT Professionals

  1. Central Administration: Cleaner UI, with Ribbon-based commands. Health Monitoring is now integrated experience. Don’t forget SP is now first class citizen of PowerShell!
  2. Best Practices Analyzer: Periodic analysis with integrated Best Practices Analyzer! Various rules available out of the box, but is extensible and new ones can be built. Issues identified can either be acted upon in UI, or can be self fixed by analyzer.
  3. Usage Reporting and Logging: Now there is a new Logging database (thank you) to log usage and health data. They promise that it will be fully documented for you to build your custom reports. Nice. You’ll have better object model to allow for custom logging in same database! I’m liking this…
  4. List Throttling: This one is great for large customers. Encourage best practices with messaging about large lists and thresholds, as they cap. I notice that cap on items in View is now ~5000, on a list that can potentially be having millions of items!!!
  5. Unattached content database recovery by temporarily mounting it to farm, and browsing the content. Forget your recovery farm.
  6. Visual Upgrade: Upgrade your farm/sites, yet retain look of SP 2007. At choice upgrade the site visually, and hence enabling (unlocking) remaining UI-dependent features with SP 2010 look. You can also do that temporarily. Well, for some farms, this is certainly a useful feature – especially when IT is ahead of the curve and users have adoption or business dependencies. I wonder how this will work with custom themes people have in SP 2007. Nevertheless, I like it much.

Developers

  1. Visual Studio 2010 with SharePoint. First class development experience is promised. I’ll be conservative on this one, until I get to play with! I like the approach with Visual Web-Part designer surface.
  2. LINQ to SharePoint. Strongly typed access to your data in SP is a great welcome with all its goodness.
  3. Developer Dashboard on SP: A small icon link to enable the dashboard, like in-page tracing with ASP.NET but with greater detail about behind-the-scene queries and objects, DB calls etc. You can even the actual SQL query or sProc call. Nice – I see ton of time being saved, and greater developer understanding building about the platform. Excellent transparency for all.
  4. Business Connectivity Services: Read/Write access is finally here. Virtually the same experience as for inherent Lists, as “External Lists” become integrated in UI and experience. Both SP 2010 and Office is promised to consume external data in rich ways, including support in SP Designer and Visual Studio. (Not to forget LINQ for external data!)
  5. Client-side Object Model: Not this is great, my imagination is running wild! Runs on users machine, client OM can be SP data on client-side via JavaScript, .NET, or through Silverlight! Loving it now!!!

SharePoint Team has confirmed launch of limited access Tech Preview, and also a public Beta is confirmed for later in the year. If you can make it, SharePoint Conference 2009 is the best place to be to learn all about SharePoint 2010. I hope SharePoint team is reading and let all die-hard evaluators have more than a sneak peek with Tech Preview! ;-)

Great Work, and its just scratching of the surface. Enjoy… more to come.

--Sharad

No Comments