LBi London

Posted by Riaz Ahmed May 11th, 2010

Having recently attended Europe’s largest SharePoint conference dedicated to SharePoint 2010, Microsoft’s newest version of SharePoint, I discuss some of the new features that will be relevant to our clients.

As I sit here in the keynote session at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference, i can feel a great buzz of excitement and energy coming from the crowd. The keynote speaker opens up by announcing the forthcoming release of a new wave of Microsoft Office and Enterprise products. The one we’re all particularly keen on – and what this post talks about most – is SharePoint 2010, Microsoft’s newest version of the very popular Office SharePoint Server 2007 (aka MOSS).

During the keynote presentation the speaker reminds us of the older versions of SharePoint, including the “tedious” SharePoint Portal Server 2001, the “almost there” SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and the “much improved and game changing” Office SharePoint Server 2007. Having developed and deployed various solutions with all these versions for customers over the last eight years, it was very clear to me just how far SharePoint had come and the huge investment by Microsoft into each version. So why was there a lot of energy and excitement over SharePoint Server 2010, how would this better MOSS and other CMS products, well here are my top features that will probably be most relevant to our clients:

Web Content Management

Let’s start off with Web Content Management (WCM), a much talked about (and controversial) functionality of SharePoint. Microsoft decided to retire the very successful Content Management Server product and bundle CMS capability into MOSS. In SharePoint 2010, WCM, has been given a big overhaul and a pretty good one too. One of the big pain points of MOSS was that it took too long to get your content into a page, with one too many clicks and steps. Now in SharePoint 2010, creating content pages and adding images and video are literally “one click” steps. Another huge problem in MOSS was very untidy and non-conformant HTML being output from content display controls (known as field controls). In SharePoint 2010 a lot of controls output much cleaner and better XHTML than MOSS. It’s not perfect, but certainly way better than MOSS and other CMS platforms out there.

Another investment area by Microsoft into WCM is the integration of ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). As Tim McConnell, Program Manager on the SharePoint Foundation team says, “SharePoint leverages ARIA in the Ribbon, in dialogs, in our new rich text editor, and elsewhere in the platform and in partner applications.”

Navigating in MOSS (and previous versions) and the general user experience wasn’t that great and users would often get lost in the vast amount of menus and links. Since the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 applications like Microsoft Word, it has been a great success and is now being used throughout SharePoint 2010. In fact the general look and feel of SharePoint 2010 reminds me of the user interface in Windows 7 and Office 2007/10…this is all part of providing end users with a common ‘look and feel’ and user experience across all Microsoft products and services.

Integration with MOSS and Office 2007 applications was good, but with SharePoint 2010, integration with Office 2010 has improved quite a bit and almost feels seamless at times. For example the user experience to publish documents from Word and Excel to a SharePoint site is so much better and easier for end users. The use of metadata and tagging throughout SharePoint (and the availability of the same metadata across all Office applications) has also been given an overhaul and allows content authors to manage metadata throughout SharePoint and also allows better use of folksonomy and taxonomy.

Search

You all heard about the acquisition of FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) by Microsoft right, well since that news broke out enterprise search team at Microsoft, who claim to have “the largest team of engineers and researchers in the world dedicated to enterprise search…”, has been busy integrating FAST into SharePoint 2010. FAST is a high-end enterprise level search engine very much similar to Endeca, Autonomy, FredHopper, etc. If you want to see FAST in action take look at www.globrix.com and www.samsung.com. Both of these websites use FAST to drive users to information through the use of search navigators using different user experiences. While the backend of FAST is still being redeveloped on Microsoft technologies (FAST has primarily been run on Linux platforms) the administration, deployment and integration of FAST in SharePoint 2010 has been made easier. There are also some useful out of the box FAST site templates and Web Parts to help you get a FAST search solution up and running quickly.

If FAST search is a bit too much for your requirements (and costly), SharePoint 2010, like MOSS, comes with search. The underlying search engine in SharePoint 2010 has been optimised, search administration is now much easier to use and management of your search deployment is now centralised. Scaling the index service is now possible so you can truly have large scale and redundant search deployments. The front end user interface of SharePoint 2010 search has been improved and in my opinion brings back search results quicker (well it is all hosted on a 64bit architecture now). The key UI improvement is the use of search refiners which allow the user to filter results by file type, author, date and even metadata categories you define; enhanced people searching(see picture above), ability to use better and improved search queries e.g. Wildcard searching, and the ability to search SharePoint from within your Windows 7 desktop.

SharePoint Development, Deployment and IT Support

Developing, deploying and even administering SharePoint has never been an easy task and believe me we have had our share of problems, frustrations and sleepless nights…well who hasn’t!!

While various development tools and admin utilities improved for MOSS by Microsoft over time, it was the SharePoint community that contributed to some very useful utilities and tools for not only developers but for SharePoint administrators too. Given that MOSS provided a pretty good development platform and came with a decent API framework, developing custom SharePoint applications to fulfil complex client requirements became ever so popular. But this all came at a cost as lots of untested and very inefficient code was being deployed to live sites and caused them to run slow and even grind to a halt. In SharePoint 2010, there is no excuse for badly performing applications or code bringing the entire site down because SharePoint 2010 provides developers with a Developer Dashboard that details exactly what is going on “under the bonnet”, now a developer can tell very easily where that ‘slow and troublesome’ bit of code is. Testers can produce these reports and fail code until it reaches acceptable levels of response times.

Like with MOSS, both Microsoft and the SharePoint community has been busy publishing a whole load of developer and administrator documents and resources for SharePoint 2010. The great thing is that a lot of learning’s and best practices from MOSS can still be applied and adopted on SharePoint 2010 projects. Now that there is better tooling and developer integration into SharePoint 2010, the development process should be a lot more ‘smoother and streamlined’ then ever before.

Performance and scalability

One of the pain points of creating content on very large scale Internet sites, corporate Intranets, document management sites, etc on MOSS was the number of items that could be held in a list. Almost everything in SharePoint is stored in a list be it a word document, image, video, web page and so on. I have talked to a number of customers who have, over time, let their content authors place documents, etc in one document list or page list. As the list has grown, there has been numerous and significant problems such as time outs when requesting documents, very slow rendering of list items, sorting of list data in a view taking forever and so on.

In SharePoint 2010, list architecture has been optimised and there is now capability to scale to very large lists. What has also helped somewhat is the ability to create folders in a pages library in a publishing site (a publishing site is commonly used to create Internet sites).

Other significant performance improvements include: all SharePoint 2010 server ‘components’ require 64bit server architecture, redundant and scalable search index servers (as mentioned before), proper database mirroring support, feature throttling and so on.

So while I have only touched on a small set of new stand out features of SharePoint 2010 (I haven’t even mentioned the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) Connector for SharePoint, a lot of new and improved Business Intelligence and Insight functionality, new Portal/Collaboration features, extensive Web Analytics, Multilingual improvements, SharePoint 2010 in the Cloud, etc, etc), I believe some of the features I mention in this post will be important to consider when deciding to upgrade, migrate or select SharePoint 2010 as a complete enterprise content management system platform.

Thanks for reading.

Riaz Ahmed

Head of Microsoft Solutions at LBi

http://www.linkedin.com/in/riazahmed

Tags: CMS, Microsoft, search, SharePoint, tech, WCM

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