Author: Fred

SharePoint Conference 09 Wrapup

It had been my intention to write daily blog posts from SPC09, but honestly there was just too much going, and I was tweeting all day anyway. I thought I would, however, post a summary of the things I saw and learned at the conference (well, the SharePoint things, not the “people acting silly” things 🙂 ). It was a great conference, well organized, and with lots of information – too much information actually, so much that I could not see all the sessions I wanted to and will have to wait for the videos to be posted.

There is a lot of new stuff coming in SharePoint 2010, and a lot of improvements to existing features. Before I get into my thoughts on the conference and SharePoint 2010 in general, I would like to recommend looking at this post. Tony Byrne makes some good points. For me, it can all be condensed down into one statement: No matter what the hype, no matter what fancy new features are there, always, ALWAYS, keep business needs front of mind – upgrade when there is a clear business reason, and not before. All of the features in the world will not help you if you do not know what you are building and why.

So, on to the good stuff! There are many things I saw at the conference which really make me excited about SharePoint 2010. The things that caught my interest can be broken down into the following groups:

  • General SharePoint features
  • Service Architecture
  • Office services
  • Development support and tools

General Features

I am not going to dwell too much on the general SharePoint features, as I am sure there will be lots of articles covering them. Obviously there are considerable user interface enhancements (though the design experts out there will no doubt crap on the overall UI). The ribbon interface is pretty impressive for things like editing pages, working with lists, and similar activities. I am not sure how well it applies in a more generic “web” world, and how it can be made to be non-intrusive in a highly customized deployment.

It is also nice to see a considerable amount of AJAX-like behaviour in the UI, thus greatly reducing the number of post backs and screen refreshes. This includes the new dialog framework – many of the actions which previously sent the user to a second page to collect information, and back again when the action was completed, are now done through layered dialogs (which are also customizable for consistency with your desired look and feel).

There have also been significant improvements to the capacity and scalability of SharePoint lists and document libraries.

Finally, it is nice to see SharePoint moving towards compliance with standards such as WCAG, XHTML, and CMIS.

Services Application Architecture

A major change in SharePoint 2010 is architectural – the introduction of the  Service Application Architecture. This is a replacement for the Shared Service Providers (SSPs) in SharePoint 2007. SSPs hosted such things as the User Profile Service, Search Services, and BDC Services. There were a number of deployment, scaling and manageability issues with SSPS, however.

Service Applications are a far more flexible approach. A Service Application can consist of a package of assemblies, databases, and other components which are deployed to a SharePoint App Server. The service is exposed via a proxy deployed to the WFE. This proxy knows how to talk to a custom WCF service on the App Server. The client (for example a Web Part) talk calls the proxy in order to consume the Service Application, without having to know where the Application Service is deployed – on the same farm or even another farm. The architecture also has built in round-robin load balancing.

Office Services

Among the services deployed in SharePoint 2010 are various office services:

  • Improved Excel Services
  • Improved InfoPath Forms Services
  • Visio Services
  • Access Services

I know there are some great improvements in Excel and Excel Services from the keynote. Excel rendering is improved, as in the interaction experience. Additionally, Excel Services now exposes REST interfaces, making it easier to consume server-based calculations and charts from other pages or web applications.

Something that specifically caught my interest is PowerPivot – which allows Excel to work with huge datasets in an effective way (the keynote showed it working with 100+ million rows – but that of course was a demo). I did not get a chance to go to the PowerPoint sessions, but will definitely have a look at the recordings when they are available. In the meantime, have a look here.

Something new which has been added in SharePoint 2010 are Visio Services allowing for the rendering of Visio diagrams in the browser, with interactivity and data binding. The Visio diagrams are rendered in a SharePoint web part using Silverlight technology. I already have a few ideas for how this could be applied to projects on which I am working.

Also added are SharePoint Access Services. This allows the publication of Access Solutions to a SharePoint where they can be centrally managed, and provides multiuser access and distribution difficult to achieve with an Access desktop solution.

There are a lot of improvements for developers in SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  So much so that I am going to do a completely separate post to cover them. To summarize:

  • Many new and improved templates in VS 2010
  • Visual designers in VS2010
  • Support for Features and Packaging in VS2010
  • Improved APIs (way too much to get into here)
  • Developer Dashboard view
  • Development support on 64-bit Vista/Windows 7
  • Improved tools in SharePoint Designer

I will be posting another write up later today specifically focused on the development improvements.

The Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog has a post summarizing these and many other features I have not gotten into here.

Using Twitter at a conference

I am finding an interesting use for Twitter at a conference. Normally I would be taking notes during the sessions. Instead, I am just tweeting the interesting points. Then, back in my room, I can pull up all my tweets for the day, and POOF – there are my notes for the day.

I think I may write a OneNote add-in to import my tweets to save them as my notes 🙂

SPC09 Coming Up

So, it is less than a week to the sold out SPC09 in Las Vegas – hoping I feel better by the time I get there. Looking at the conference schedule, there looks to be an abundance of great content. My one complaint is that so much of it is concurrent – at least they will be recording all of the sessions so I can at least watch all of them.  

I will be blogging and tweeting live from the conference – so check it out (among the several thousand others who will be, as well lol)

Man fined $305 for smoking in workplace – his truck

 Man fined $305 for smoking in workplace – his truck – Canada – Canoe.ca

Ok, this is going to be another rant.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Another example of our government sticking their noses into things that are none of their damn business. Whether smoking is bad for me or not, it is none of the government’s business if I do it in an environment which is not harming anyone else (I do not smoke, by the way).

If they can give a ticket to a truck driver for smoking in his own truck with no one else around, what is next? Will they come into my house and give me a ticket because I work from home?

It is long past time to stand up to our governments and stop them from invading our privacy. It is none of the government’s business if I smoke when I am by myself. It is none of government’s business if I wear a helmet on my motorcycle, or a seatbelt in my car. I wear both helmets and seatbelts because I am a compulsive “rule follower”, but I should not have to. It is none of the governments business if I want to watch TV purchased from south of the border, without the CRTC’s interference. I should even be able to smoke a little marijuana if I so choose (I do not do that either).

Just think of all of the money our various levels of government could save if they would just stay the hell out of things which are none of their concern!

Kindle 2 not coming to Canada? Who Cares?

 

Kindle 2 not coming to Canada | Quill & Quire

So, Kindle 2 is coming to 100 countries worldwide, and Canada is not one of them. Certainly not surprising. From the quote in the above post, it would seem that most of the issues preventing Kindle form coming to Canada involve digital publishing rights and negotiations with wireless carriers (isn’t that what held up the iPhone from coming to Canada for a long time?).

For me, it is really a non-issue. I cannot imagine spending that much money (it will probably be $500 in Canada, even with the favourable exchange rate) on yet another single-purpose tool.

I read eBooks on my slate Tablet PC. Google Reader and other tools in full screen mode provide a great reading experience. I can also use tools like PDF Annotator to mark up, red line and highlight  to my heart’s content. I can take pieces of text and print them to OneNote to consolidate research on a subject. Then on top of that, I have an actual PC so I can do all of the PC things I want to do.

Why on earth would I want to downgrade to a Kindle?

UPDATE:

Also reading this article on CNN. I notice the statement:

Apple is working on a tablet computer that is expected to launch in the coming months and which includes all the functionality of an e-reader.

Either the author did not do any homework, or is purposely biased (as most of the tech media is) towards the uber-coolness that is Apple (note extreme sarcasm here). Microsoft has had Tablet PCs for 7 years which also includes all of the functionality of an e-reader (I know, since I have been using it for that purpose for most of those 7 years).

It must be nice to be like Apple and Google, and have the so-called press do much of your marketing for you.

Guardian: “Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet”. Really?

I hate to point this out, but contrary to what the Apple fanboys would have you believe, Microsoft beat Apple to the Tablet 7 years ago lol – they just f***ed up the marketing (as always).

As always, Apple loses the time-to-market battle, but will no doubt win the fanboy opinion battle. A few months a from now, the notoriously anti-Microsoft media will be proclaiming how brilliant Apple is for “inventing” the Tablet. 

Guardian: “Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet”. Really? « Sharing the truth one thread at a time

Does anyone else hate video on news sites?

This is something that really bugs me – when I am looking around on news sites (CNN, Canoe, whatever) and I click on a headline to see what is behind it. Then I get a video – generally with little to no textual summary. While video is a wonderful medium, a lot of the time I have no interest in watching a video. I can find out what I want to know in an article by scanning the text in 10-20 seconds. On the other hand, if there is video I generally have to sit through 20-30 seconds of advertising, and then 2-3 minutes of content to find out the little bit of information I want.

So please, news sites, stop wasting my time!

What’s Wrong with SharePoint?

So, I am watching Twitter updates go by (as I always do, even on a Saturday night), including my search that shows me all the tweets with “sharepoint” in them. As anyone knows who watches any amount of SharePoint commentary go by, there is a fairly constant flow of comments of the “SharePoint sucks” variety.

So this evening this led me to ask the question “What is wrong with SharePoint?” No, I do not mean I want a list of every nit picking, annoying little defect – every platform has defects and annoyances. I also do not want to know why SharePoint is note good for everything – no platform is good for everything. I also do not give a crap if your opinion is “it comes from Microsoft therefore it MUST suck” – it that is as deep as your analysis can go, well, you’re a moron.

What I want to see from SOMEONE is an intelligent, well thought out description of why SharePoint sucks. Why is it a bad choice for anything? Why should you perform an exorcism on all servers running any version of SharePoint?

I did a web search (notice I did not say “google” – contrary to popular usage, google is not a verb) for “what is wrong with SharePoint?” The only relevant results I found on either Google or Bing were written in 2005 or before, and hence are not particularly relevant at this point. For example, the post Five Things Wrong with SharePoint from back in 2005 tries to talk about what is actually wrong  with SharePoint. Even though I disagree with a lot of what it says, I will not refute it since it is so old.

So – if SharePoint is so bad…if all the otherwise intelligent people implementing solutions over SharePoint are wrong – where the heck are the statements as to what is wrong with it. So tell me – WHAT IS WRONG WITH SHAREPOINT? I really want to know, and to share it with others.