C/D/H Talks Tech

Author:

David Tappan

I have been working in IT for 12+ years and have spent the last 6 years with C/D/H.

My specialties have grown over the years, and now include:
Active Directory/LDAP/Directory Synchronization, Exchange and SMTP, Office Communications Server, and SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint!

When I’m not at work, my favorite activities are gardening, skiing and spending time with my wife and 3 kids.

More about David
Articles by David Tappan

I’m not at the SharePoint Conference this year (*sniff*) although three of my colleagues are (hurray!); but I console myself since I got to go to SharePoint 2010 “Ignite” training in Atlanta a month ago.  This was a beta of the training Microsoft is preparing for partners, and I had the privilege of being in a class with the first 75 people outside of Microsoft. 

 The best parts of the training were:

• A deep technical dive on Microsoft SharePoint Server (MSS) 2010 with some of the biggest gurus, both within Microsoft and without.
• Personal attention to questions from a lot of people at Microsoft who are extremely committed to the quality both of the 2010 product and the training that will go with it.

The worst part of the training was:

• I was forbidden to talk about it to anyone until the SharePoint Conference.

Well, the conference has started, so I’m going to let loose with a brain dump of everything I’ve learned about MSS 2010 for the benefit of all.  Keep in mind that the product was still very much in flux when I was at the training, so we may find that some of the features or problems I encountered no longer apply. 

For today, I’m going to give you a high-level overview of the coolest new features that will (I firmly believe) make MSS 2010 as big of a success, if not more so, than MOSS has been.  I believe that, not only due to the impressive new features and enhanced quality of the new version, but because Microsoft made it clear at training that they are committed to ensuring that support both from Microsoft and from the partner ecosystem is fully up to speed at RTM.  This will be a huge improvement from the release of MOSS, which was plagued, as most of you know, by a shortage of skilled personnel to support it.

So, what are some of the cool new features of MOSS 2010?

New ribbon interface—Microsoft has greatly enhanced the usability of SharePoint, and improved the consistency with Office 2007 and beyond, by building in a ribbon interface for common actions and settings.  It is context sensitive, and very fluid and dynamic, owing to the use of AJAX/Silverlight.  Common tasks such as site, list and item settings, as well as in-line WYSIWYG editing with mouse-over format preview, are part of what makes this feature really useful.  This is included in WSS as well, and I think people will find that Team Site delegation is greatly eased by the intuitiveness of the interface.

Social networking—Social tagging is literally everywhere in MSS.  It is much more powerful and useful than in MOSS, due to the following improvements, among others:

• You can tag anything – pages, list items, even content from anywhere on the Internet, with the addition of a browser add-in.
• My Site is redesigned as a Facebook-like feed of your interests and comments as evidenced by your tags.  
• Corporate “managed tags” plus shared personal tags—Tags have always been scary for enterprise information architects because they have the potential to create chaos in the corporate taxonomy.  MSS 2010 allows administrators to define unchangeable corporate tags, while at the same time letting users share their own tags outside of the approved taxonomy.   If you like, you can also mark your tags private if you don’t want to share them.  And the administrator can delete/rename/consolidate personal tags as needed.
• Auto-complete on tags really helps to keep the tag-sphere as clean as possible.
• Noteboard—This is a comment stream you can create in addition to tags, and other users can write on it—like a Facebook wall.  I can comment on anything you do, and the comment will be surfaced on the content, on your My Site, and on my My Site.  Of course, all this is subscribable in email and RSS, and of course searchable.

Document Management/ECM—This is my favorite topic in SharePoint architecture, so I was really excited to see some of the new features.

• Managed Metadata “term store”—This is how the above-mentioned corporate “tags” are managed.  Managed Metadata is a new Shared Service application that allows administrators to define hierarchical trees of metadata terms, which are then promulgated out to all site collections that are consuming the Managed Metadata shared service (more on the architectural changes of Shared Services later in the week).    Think of them as “super site columns”.
• Content type subscriptions—Similar to Managed Metadata, you can define content types from a particular site collection as subscribable.  These are “pushed down” to all other participating site collections. 
• Document set content types—This is something that a lot of us have tried to make work in MOSS, but it was kludgy.  Now with MSS, you can define a set of multiple documents as part of a single content type.  So for example, if you always need to create a set of certain documents as part of a “project kickoff” or “legal discovery” or “fantasy football league”—or anything else you can imagine—you can define the entire set of documents, including templates, columns, and workflows, and allow the entire set to be generated at the start of whatever it is that you are starting. 
• Records Center—This app was kind of a disappointment to many of us in MOSS—it was really just a demonstration of the possibilities of MOSS for document management, but you couldn’t really do much with it by itself.  It also lacked certain key functions, such as unique document IDs.  Now the new Records Center—and indeed any document library—can have the following features if you enable them:
  • Unique document IDs farm-wide
  • Send to Records Center, and leave a link behind—this plus unique document IDs makes it possible to actually determine that a record has already been declared on a document—a glaring omission in MOSS.
  • Auto-filing—allows you to define a rule to create folders automatically in a library based on unique values in a column on the items.  Despite prior claims that metadata makes folders obsolete, folders are still very useful, and this solution makes them automatic for information management.

I learned a lot more, but I’m going to stop for today.  I’ll be going through a lot of other features, as well as diving deeper (including screenshots) on the topics above, later in the week.  If I can’t be there at SPC, I can at least feel like I’m involved by sharing what I learned a month ago!