A Point to Share

Sharepoint 2010 unveiled:What’s Exciting and What’s Not.

A large part of the global SharePoint community descended upon Las Vegas last week to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009.  The unveiling of new SharePoint 2010 platform was, undoubtedly, the highlight and core focus of the event and Twitter was hammered all week with tweets containing #spc09 and #sp2010 hashtags.

So for all of you (like me) who missed this massive event the good news is there is plenty of information trickling in already and lots more to be pouring out over the next few weeks.

Even more good news…expect SharePoint 2010 betato be finally released and available sometime in November. We can assume that the early adopters can expect to have a RTM version early in the summer of 2010.

Here are a few SP 2010 features that I’m getting excited about:

1. The Office Ribbon will now be integrated into SharePoint UI. I like this enhancement as it should provide users with better acess to tools and menu options as well as making it more consistent with the Office Suite interface.
2. AJAX is natively enabled. This means no more postbacks when authoring pages  and modifying web parts! A huge improvement in my opinion, one which is long overdue. Plus Sharepoint 2010 is also XHTML compliant which will improve accessibility and cross-browser usability (Firefox, Safari, Opera)
3. No more tables in SharePoint code ( almost entirely all CSS\DIV based). This means cleaner, sharper and faster loading pages.
4. Big improvements in Search through the integration of FAST providing aspects such as:
   • Faceted Search modules standard out of the box
   • Query completion, spell checking and true wild card searching
   • Document thumbnails as an alternative to file-type icons
5. Stsadm command-line will be most likely replaced by a new Powershell Admin to enable faster, simpler and more extensive scripting of administrative tasks.
6. The central admin UI gets a much needed face-lift.
7. Groove is replaced by an integrated SharePoint Workspaces to provided a more seamless and consistent experience with Office (2010 of course).
8. Tagging and tag clouds will be OOTBas well as RSS feeds on tags. Well, this is a no-brainer and should have already been introduced in the current version.
9. Finally, Microsoft is promising that this version is a lot more “social” and community-driven. I’ve heard a lot of buzz already over this, but I’ll just wait and see for myself hopefully in November.

What I’m not looking forward to is: 

• MOSS 2007 has basically 2 versions – Standard and Enterprise. It looks like 2010 will have at least 8 different standard and enterprise flavorsof SharePoint targeting Intranet, Internet and Fast Search separately. Plus there are 2 additional SharePoint Online versions. No doubt, a licensing nightmare for everyone.
•  All these 2010 editions are offered in 64-bit version only.  What’s required is Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  Recommended memory is a minimum of 8 GB. It also requires SQL Server 2005 SP3 with CU (Cumulative Update) 3 or SQL Server 2008 SP1. This is good news in terms of application performance and extensibility, but  it will also induce a lot of pains and add  heavy costs in upgrade and migration plans. By far the majority of implementations out there are 32-bit versions running on Windows 2003.

Here are some good resources if your interested in learning more:

• Sharepoint 2010 – official site
• Microsoft Team Blog
• Impressions from Sharepoint 2010
• Sharepoint 2010 Top Ten Features & Resources

If you attended the conference, I’d love to hear your comments and feedback as well!