Standards Compliant SharePoint 2010 - Too good to be true??

 

Well it seems not. Microsoft have really pulled out all of the stops this time around, with standards compliant, cross browser compatibility and even accessibility hitting the conference headlines.

 

The first item of note is that SharePoint 2010 aims to be W3C XHTML compliant. This is a massive leap towards making SharePoint 2010 a truly robust platform, worthy of both internet facing sites and global internal systems.

 

I saw a demo of an embedded video in the Monday afternoon Web Content Management  session where a video was streamed from a Document Library (another new SharePoint 2010 feature) and it was loaded in FireFox with no plugins or downloads, full screen streaming and buffering.

 

But the biggest impact is bound to be around the statement that one of the major release goals for the SharePoint 2010 release is that the entire interface of SharePoint 2010 meets WCAG 2.0 AA compliance! This includes editing and authoring of content! This is absolutely massive, and represents a huge push from Microsoft to really respond to the community feedback that accessibility is a subject to be taken seriously.

 

Of course, there is bound to be community discussions around the ideology that "compliant" is not the same as "accessible" (which we at Content and Code know all too well, having developed several systems for the RNIB) but this is still a massive step forward and certainly shows a continuing respect of standards from Microsoft and good news for the future of compliant software.

Why I love the performance in SharePoint 2010

 

There really is no doubt about it, SharePoint 2010 is QUICK... We are talking several factors faster than SharePoint 2007. Now this is mainly from looking in the product demos and session examples, but if they are a true reflection of a typical SharePoint implementation then we're really in for a treat.

 

I watched a demonstration in the opening "Overview of SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals" an example of a  document library with 1,000,000+ documents which was filtering, sorting and refreshing in under 3 seconds.

 

Having filtered the view down to just 4 records it was then demonstrated that images could be opened from that library in under 1 second! And this is native, out of the box ... and with over 1 million documents in a single library ... running on pre-beta code!

 

This is nothing short of astonishing, and with some of the other features such as automatic column indexing, filtering setup and hierarchical navigation we are looking at an amazing set of features to make even the largest of SharePoint 2010 deployments absolutely fly!

 

Every time I look at SharePoint 2010 I get more excited about the feature sets, and it seems that Microsoft have followed the same vein with SharePoint 2010 that they did with Windows 7, in that performance and usability are two of the biggest "killer apps".

Key notes from the Keynotes - SharePoint Conference 2009

 

The keynote speeches contained a helluva lot of content, but there were some key points that were worth condensing into a post ... so errr.. thats what I did :)

 

One of the main aesthetic changes is that  Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is now called SharePoint Foundation 2010. Hopefully more details about capabilities will surface during the conference.

 

There was much talk about SharePoint Online. They apparently have over 100,000,000 users and the platform is updated quarterly with new functionality, so we can hope to see new SharePoint 2010 functionality in that creeping through once the RTM version of SharePoint  is released.

 

The list item storage limits has gone WAY up ... 1,000,000 items per folder/list and over 10,000,000 documents per library (more about this in my next post).

 

Another favourite was how Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 allows you to expose excel data as REST feeds (such as charts, tables, images, pivot tables). This allows you to subscribe to an image URL which is actually being dynamically generated from the Excel 2010 spread sheet. The main focus here was that you can embed this image anywhere that a normal HTML or Office Client image can be placed, but if the Excel 2010 spread sheet data is modified then the image is automatically updated to reflect those changes!

 

Other highlights included forcing spelling checkers and broken link checkers on check-in of a page.  In fact there was a lot of mention around web sites full stop, particularly 2 new products for websites:

• SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites
• FAST Search Server for Internet Business

 

The new Wiki Editing features were also demonstrated with auto-complete URLs for lists, views and folders in libraries.

 

For those power users there are also over 500 new PowerShell commands for SharePoint 2010 which will be shipped with the Beta version in November! These can even be run on a Windows 7 machine and executed remotely!

 

But by far the most impressive part for me was the presentation on SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel 2010. This is the product formerly known as "Gemini" and allows you to pull data in from SQL databases to allow up to 100,000,000 rows of data in Excel 2010! You can then filter, sort and produce charts which refresh near instantaneously! There was a demo of this in the session causing a round of applause from pretty much everyone.

 

A very interesting session in the end, with glimpses of promise from all over the platform.. I just can't wait to get my hands on it all!

Tasty facts and figures about SharePoint Conference 2009

Wow ... thats the word that pretty much summed up the team's reaction to the Keynote speeches to open the conference. I'll post about that in a bit, but to warm you up some tasty facts and figures:

 

538 onsite labour days to setup the conference

7.5 miles of CAT5e cable used (for the Wireless Network?? ;))

7400+ attendees (up over 90% on the last SharePoint conference)

160+ partners

300+ hours of brand new content

297 speakers

240 break-out sessions

(and 2 marriages!!)

 

so .. you could say they are taking this conference VERY seriously.

 

We also had some very interesting news. The Public Beta of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will be launched in November!

They are expecting an RTM release in the first half of 2010.

 

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was also released today! :)

The trip to Vegas

Well, it's been a REALLY long day... Around 26 hours straight without sleep. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I love being cramped into a metal tube with no leg-room and only 1 movie I want to watch for 14 hours of flying ... but what really hit hard was when they run out of beer!

 

So .. What have we been up to so far? Well, unfortunately not a lot. I met up with the group at Heathrow around 10am Saturday morning. Everyone in good spirits (apart from one of my colleagues insistence that a cavity search was imminent going through customs!)

 

All went well, and we were in the air on-time. The flight passed surprisingly quickly. My colleagues decided to use the power of Heineken to help the flight pass quicker ... unfortunately ... the plane ran out!!! (Jason did try London Pride but that did not last long). After that there was nothing for it .. Time to start on the Vodka (you can tell when you're having an impact when you ask for a drink and the stewardess says "not you lot again!").

 

11 hours later we landed in Dallas. A bit to eat. Another 3 hours (me stuck next to two guys trying to tell me about their ATM conference and the virtues of American "Football" (shudder)) and we landed in Vegas... dark, hot, and full of bright lights!

 

So the first day is over and the conference starts tomorrow!! (can't wait!)

 

Some interesting Vegas facts:

 

• If you spent 1 night in every hotel room in Vegas you would end up staying for 288 years
• The Luxor atrium (the hotel we are staying in) is the largest in the world
• Over 60,000 people take up residence in Vegas every year, making it the fastest growing city in the USA.

 

 

Another post tomorrow... right now it's 9am and I'm heading for breakfast! (all you can eat! HELL yeh!)

Visual Studio 2010 - Automatic creation of SharePoint WSPs for deployment (joy!)

It's long been a challenge to generate WSP packages effectively.

 

Back in the old days we would manually hand-crank out DDF files and manifest.xml and use makecab utilities to generate them. There was the most short-lived of joy when everyone rushed to download VSeWSS (Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services) ... and then made an equally mad rush to un-install it when they realised how bad it was! Finally most people settled on 3rd party tools like WSP Builder, but even then quietly grumbled about it's limitations and bugs.

 

Well .. the time is here to rejoice once more .. Visual Studio 2010 to the rescue! (queue golden lights, music and champagne).

 

So what does Visual Studio 2010 bring to the table then?

 

Well, the most interesting thing to note is that VS10 (Visual Studio 2010) has baked-in support for SharePoint 2010. This includes a whole raft of project templates; Web Parts, Site Definitions, Workflows, Business Continuity Services (a.k.a. BDC.. and very interestingly an "import workflow from SharePoint Designer" option!).

 

All of these include baked in WSP support in the form of a new "package" folder in the project structure. This is the bit responsible for turning your Visual Studio solution and re-packaging it up into a WSP (no 3rd party tools, no code, no complicated build scripts!)

 

The really cool bit is in the deploy / undeploy options:

• Create WSP file
• Reset IIS app pools
• Add / Retract solution from SharePoint
• Activate features
• Run Pre/Post build commands
• <Custom Actions>

This allows you to customise these actions (so that they execute in any order you like!) and the ability to add your own Custom Actions makes this VERY exciting!

 

You can also modify the manifest.xml template that it uses (adding your own custom markup if you want!) and specify any external assemblies that should be included, even specifying if those other assemblies should be GAC or bin deployed!

 

Finally, the last one of note is the ability to import an existing WSP and convert it to a Visual Studio Project. The implications for this are massive! Any older projects or 3rd party WSPs can now be migrated over to the new VS10 structure. Of course custom code will not be migrated in, but it is a cracking effort and goes a long way to making this more manageable (especially for "code free" CAML based features!!)

 

All of the above is covered in the online free sneak-peek sessions, so if you haven't already, go watch the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek video for Developers now!

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Developer-Video.aspx

Visual Studio 2010 and TFS connection: "The ServicePointManager does not support proxies with the https scheme."

Using the beta version of Visual Studio 2010, and trying to connect to a Team Foundation Server, you may find that you get the error message:

 

"The ServicePointManager does not support proxies with the https scheme."

 

You'll only get this of course if you are trying to connect using HTTPS / port 443. The workaround seems to be some reg fixes which tell the TFS client to bypass the proxy.

 

Aaron Block's MSDN blog seems to have the answer to this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ablock/archive/2009/05/20/for-tfs-2010-beta-1-resolving-tf31001-the-servicepointmanager-does-not-support-proxies-with-the-https-scheme.aspx

SharePoint Tabs Made Easy

While browsing EndUserSharePoint found a good post about using a JQuery script embedded into a CEWP.

From my brief look this basically turned every web part on the page into tabs so that you can create VERY quick and easy tabbed dashboard interfaces. Extremely quick, extremely easy ... the best bit is no code, no development.

You can check out the article (and the video) here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/10/05/yes-believe-it-the-sharepoint-easy-tabs-interface-web-part/

The History of SharePoint

A really nice article posted up by the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog:

As we are just two weeks away from disclosing SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference starting October 19^th, I wanted to write three posts to provide context on the upcoming release. This first post will cover the history of SharePoint. I hope it will provide some useful perspective behind our vision and what we have learned as well as a few fun anecdotes. The second post will cover the engineering process for SharePoint 2010 - how we design and develop SharePoint in the Office team, what new approaches we have taken during the 2010 development cycle and my take on a few frequent questions I hear from customers and partners. The third post will coincide with the opening of SharePoint Conference and cover the major feature investments. After that, our team will star blogging in depth about the new SharePoint capabilities. For folks who cannot wait, we have highlighted a few of the new features on the SharePoint 2010 Preview Site as commented on several Office 2010 client capabilities including a few points of SharePoint integration on the Office Engineering Blog.

Before we jump in to this post, I want to thank everyone who has been with us on the journey so far and is supporting us in the release of SharePoint 2010 and feedback for releases beyond. While I will talk about the efforts that evolved into SharePoint, its origin dates to around March 1998 when we first started planning the projects that led to SharePoint. Since the first beta of the first release, we have been extremely fortunate to have your support and hear your feedback. It has been extremely rewarding to see all things you are doing with SharePoint. We have posters of many of your sites on the walls of Building 16 on the Microsoft Redmond Campus and these are a source of great motivation and pride for our team to take things to the next level. We always appreciated your ideas and feedback friendly or otherwise about where the product should go or how we could help you better. We think SharePoint 2010 will be another big step forward but we know there is more to be done and are thankful you care enough to keep pushing us. Finally, we want to thank the Microsoft teams around the world who has worked so hard to build and support the product with special thanks to a few dozen people who were with us from the very beginning in 1998. We are very fortunate to have a great team, customers and partners and that is what keeps us fired up to come to work every day.

to read more go to:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/05/sharepoint-history.aspx

SAS (SharePoint Accessibility Solution) - WCAG 2.0 AAA reusable framework for SharePoint

I am proud to finally announce the official release of SAS (SharePoint Accessibility Solution) by Content and Code.

 

The release of an accessible framework for SharePoint is a massive step for both SharePoint, Content and Code any organisations looking for an accessible SharePoint platform.

 

This framework was used (and developed) for the RNIB Website (which I posted about a few weeks back: RNIB - World's first AAA website launched in SharePoint).

"Accessibility is mandatory for many organisations, allowing access to the web for all. Our SharePoint 2007 Accessibility Framework allows sites to be built rapidly without sacrificing SharePoint functionality."

- Tim Wallis, CEO, Content and Code

By all means check it out and tell me what you think :)

http://www.contentandcode.com/solutions/Pages/accessibility.aspx