C/D/H Talks Tech

Author:

David Tappan

I have been working in IT for 15+ years and have spent the last 10 years with C/D/H.

My specialties have grown over the years, and now include:
Active Directory/LDAP/Directory Synchronization, Exchange and SMTP, Lync, 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

The temptation was really strong to share what I learned at SharePoint Ignite before the SharePoint Conference, but I managed to control myself.  Maybe it was the thought of a bunch of Microsoft lawyers putting me under the klieg lights and giving me the third degree if I cracked early.  But now the truth can be told—MSS 2010 is going to amaze everyone.  Today’s topic:  Lists!

List Improvements—Whether you use WSS or MOSS, you have had to work a lot with SharePoint lists.  You’ll be glad to know that there are some extremely exciting new features in this area:

• List views are now all data views—If you’ve ever tried to customize a built-in SharePoint list view, you’ll know about the lack of flexibility.  In MSS/WSS, list views are now basically data views as you know now in the Data Form web part.  This means that you can leverage XSLT to do almost anything with the view. 
• Customizing List forms is now stupid easy.  List forms (newform, editform, etc) can be replaced with an InfoPath form with a click of the list settings ribbon—allowing for all the intelligence and flexibility that implies.

• Improved validation.  Lists contain much more built-in validation, even without InfoPath.  It’s possible to use regular expressions to check values, or to require uniqueness. 
  

• Lookup columns are smarter. Lists can be linked in a more relational manner—but don’t try to turn it into a relational database, because it won’t scale that well.  What you can do is require that if a parent is deleted, all the children that point to it are deleted, or you can deny the ability to delete a parent if any children look it up.

Also, lookup Columns let you show data from other columns besides the lookup column.  This is one of those “Well, duh!” moments, when you realize how useful this is.

• File plans, information management, records declaration all are built into lists or content types.  This makes it really easy to create ad hoc or enterprise file plans. 

• Large lists? No Problem!  Well, maybe a little problem, but it’s so much easier to manage.  First, the 2,000 item limit per list view is now a 5,000 item limit.  Second, you can auto-file documents in a document library based on unique or range values in any column—making it easy to organize your content and keep folders under that 5,000 limit. Finally, if you do happen to allow a view to grow too large, SharePoint will gracefully decline to render the view with a clear error message, allowing you to rectify the situation—but without any risk of bringing down your site collection. 

There is so much more to say about lists, I could write ten blog posts about it.  I encourage you to get your hands on a copy of MSS 2010 as soon as it goes into public beta, and just play around with lists.

OK, that’s enough for today.  Tomorrow, we’ll turn to farm architecture, and I’ll share with you two topics:  Service Applications (formerly Shared Services) and Search.