SharePoint 2010 has been Released To Manufacturing (RTM)

Approx 2 hours ago, SharePoint 2010 has been Released to Manufacturing.

This is what landed in my mailbox a bit earlier (see full announcement here http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/):

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We are pleased to announce that a short time ago, we officially released Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 to manufacturing!

RTM (Release to Manufacturing) is the final engineering milestone of our product development cycle, and is a significant achievement for all of us. We could not have reached this point without the participation of more than 5,000 customers, partners, MVPs and dedicated individuals who have all worked with us on early deployment and testing of the products. The feedback that we’ve received from you has helped deliver a set of products we are very excited about.

Important Dates and Product Availability Information!
You can expect to see Office 2010 in retail stores in June, and can pre-order Office 2010 at http://store.microsoft.com/OfficePreorder today to receive Office when it ships in June.

Join us for the Virtual Launch Event – May 12th

As announced earlier, we will officially launch Office 2010 to our business customers on May 12 in New York City with a keynote from Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division.

People around the globe can participate in a virtual launch by going to http://www.the2010event.com/. The virtual launch will include product demos, customer and partner testimonials, and interviews with product managers and executives.

On behalf of the entire Office team, we thank you for helping us reach the RTM milestone!

Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Beta Program Team
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REMEMBER, ClearPeople are running a "SharePoint 2010 Launch - the day after" event in London (UK) on May 13th. See more here: http://www.clearpeople.com/

Some other new good info here:

The official blog of the Microsoft Office product development group: http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/

Latest SDK: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557253(office.14).aspx

Also, for those nervous about the new UI - here is a newly released course;-)
"Make the switch to the new SharePoint 2010 user interface"
http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/make-the-switch-to-the-new-sharepoint-2010-user-interface-RZ101806469.aspx?redir=0

Enjoy ;-)

Gabriel

SharePoint Server 2010 – My selected picks

 

I returned to London from a week in Las Vegas for the SharePoint Conference 2009. The conference was from Monday (19 Oct 2009) until the Thursday, and I topped it up with a Deep Dive Developer course on the Friday.

It was amazing to see others – during the sessions - typing away on the netbooks, laptops, tablets and what not – presumably straight to twitter, blog spaces etc. My head simply could not contain all the info I was being fed – while also getting it published it to the world in a sensible way. So I opted for the good old notepad (yes, the one made of paper) and 25 pages later, during my flight back to London (my head was still spinning) I started working on this.

And this blog really is a summary of my own selected picks. How did I pick? Well – there were 4 days worth of content spread over 250 sessions. So it was clearly hard to keep up with it all. My special interests were DM, ECM, WCM, Search and BI and so had to prioritise accordingly. So my pickings obviously reflect the sessions that I attended, combined with the work we have done on SharePoint 2010 since we got our hands on it back in July.

For those of you interested in the new "SharePoint family" naming, this is what I noted down:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010 (which is really WSS 4.0)
  
• SharePoint Server 2010
  
• SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard
  
• SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise
  
• Search Server 2010
  
• Search Server Express 2010
  
• FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
  
• FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites
  

On the client side it appears we simply have:

• Standard Client Access License
  
• Enterprise Client Access License
  

Overview

I have split my notes into a few logical sections below ... and I have promised our team to write a special blog on each of these sections (as soon as I can, I promise, I promise).

• Scalability
  
• ECM / DM
  
• WCM
  
• Search
  
• And the rest
  

 

Scalability (yes you know what I am talking about,... the old 2000 item limit and the size of content db)

Those that have worked with SharePoint for a while will have faced the question about volume limitations. Is SharePoint really limited to 2000 items, etc?

The real truth was not as straight forward. The fact is that in MOSS 2007 the web UI does suffer with large lists views – although the list itself can cope with far higher numbers. Typically for DM solutions, we would recommend using add-ons, to improve the support of very large lists. It is however all about design of your document repository (i.e. the Site Collections, Sites, Document Libraries, and so forth).

With SharePoint 2010 the story is however changing (and how!).

The two major DM obstacles (or shall we say design constraints) that we have to work with in MOSS 2007 are: 1) number of items in a list and 2) the size of a single content database.

Microsoft was keen to press that "volume is no longer a problem" and that they have listened. And so, this is what we now will get in SharePoint 2010:

• Very (very) large Document Libraries are now supported
  
• RBS (Remote Blob Storage, and nothing to do with Royal Bank of Scotland) can be used to store Blobs (i.e. the binary object - or file) outside the content database
  

And the numbers are? Well, Microsoft is not releasing any official capacity limits until closer to the final release. But, Ryan Duguid (who held some great ECM sessions by the way) was floating numbers as follows:

• 1 million items within one single sub folder within a single document library
  
• 10s (tens) of millions of items within one single document library
  
• 100s (hundreds) of millions of items within a large repository scenario (i.e. across document libraries, site collections, etc).
  

Obviously we will all be anticipating the hard / committed capacity limits – but the fact is that I saw some exceptionally large lists in the demos – and they were rendering really fast. If my memory serves me right, one of the demos showed a document library with millions of documents, and when browsing for documents "by metadata" and filters, the results were rapidly narrowed down to a few documents without any noticeable delay. It was impressive!

So, as you can see, list sizing appears to have been sorted out for even the very demanding scenarios.

That leaves us with the infamous content database size. Old recommendations were about 50GB in size for a single content database, but with more modern storage systems, the practical limits are often pushed more towards 2-400GB per content database. With RBS however, we now have a completely different approach to consider, as we can control whether to push binary data outside the content database. And this can be configured (in MS SQL) per content database. Neat! Aside from RBS, what we heard is that an official 100GB is floated as a "very safe content database size" but really it comes down to what IT Operations are comfortable with (time to backup etc).

When should you use RBS instead of storing Blobs directly in the DB you ask? There is no straight answer, it comes down to IT requirements, plans to scale and so forth. However, as a guideline if you are planning repositories of above 5 TB or more, then you are very likely to want to consider the RBS option.

Other scaling options have also improved. You can now scale out your search query and crawl servers to an unlimited number of servers.

ECM / DM

This is an area where the SharePoint story and approach is changing massively. I hardly know where to start when it comes to the improvements, enhancements, new features and new possibilities.

We had been working on some of the capabilities in preview, but seeing it all presented during the sessions and demos was superb (as mentioned before Ryan Duguid served some great sessions and demos and patiently answered many questions).

Yes granted – there are still things missing. Larger law firms are still going to ask about very particular features that will require customisations, and users will still demand better Office integration. But the fact is that SharePoint 2010 now has a bunch of very powerful and flexible ECM/DM platform features that greatly improves the story compared to MOSS 2007. It makes it even more attractive for us as partners to build cost-effective, scalable and flexible ECM / DM solutions on this platform, as the platform toolset has just gotten a lot better.

I guess if I had to choose one phrase to cover it all, I think I would go with, it's all about "metadata, metadata and metadata". Not 100% accurate, but not far of either.

In summary, in the ECM / DM space I am very excited about:

The big ones:

• Managed Metadata Service: Allows us to manage taxonomies / term stores centrally and utilise across farms.
  
• Content Type Syndication: We can now work with centralised management of content types (and their associated columns, policies and workflow definitions). Across farms via "content type hub sites"!
  
• Advanced Routing / Content Organizer: This one will "rock your pants" (yes, I was in Vegas) Mr/Mrs Records Manager when dealing with complex file plans. Using this we can automatically file document into target location based on rules. This can be used for Records Management and for standard sites.
  

Data quality:

• Managed Metadata field type: This new field type allows users to pick values from the taxonomy term stores, using tree-navigation, and/or type-ahead (intellisense style)
  
• Better support for automating populating of metadata. For instance, folders can now have rules set to automatic adding of metadata. E.g. for the "2010" folder, add rule "year=2010".
  
• Unique Document ID: A new feature and column to allow us to define numbering schemes on Site Collection level. Personally I think it is a bit limited in terms of its flexibility, but we can – as usual – hook into 3^rd party number generators. What is great about this is that this feature also allows us a persistent path back to a file, using its ID, even if it gets moved to a new location.
  
• Content Rating is now supported with a new column type.
  

Working with content:

• Browse "by meta data" is a major enhancement to how you can locate a document within a document library. So you can now, part from the usual sorting and column filtering and search, narrow your scope by browsing the list using any structured metadata field definitions. This also works with Office applications, as an alternative to opening by browsing.
  
• There is a new special content type for a "Document Set", which is configured with sub-content-types. Document Sets can be versioned, moved etc collectively. So you can regard a Document Set as a bunch of documents that belong together, sort of like a bunch of related work items.
  
• Office 2010 now knows about the templates in a SP2010 document library for creating "New".
  

And....:

• Records Management capabilities are greatly improved. We now also have support for records to be managed "In Place" or to be sent to a Record Centre. And not only can this be used for documents but it can also be used for other list items such as blogs, wikis etc.
  
• Retention schedules: You can now set Retention Schedules for Content Types or Location. Also there is now support for multi-scheduled retention schemes.
  
• eDiscovery and Holds: I am a bit weak here on what the new and improved features are. We haven't played much with this yet, and my notes from the sessions are scarce. But I circled it twice on my note-paper,.. so it's gotta be good. Will update this when I know more!
  
• Support for RBS (Remote Blob Storage) as mentioned above. This appears to be a recommendation when working on repositories over 5/10 TB.
  
• File system: Support for file system classification management, which can in turn promote files to SharePoint based on rules. I have a mental not that this could be used for some migration scenarios. Combined with Content Organizer, quite a hot thing for sure!
  

And, last but not least, don't forget Microsoft's involvement in CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Spec). There is apparently a commitment to support CMIS for the SharePoint 2010 launch.

WCM

Remember when Microsoft started to leak some of the improvements for Internet sites with SharePoint 2010? A phrase that I thought was really funny went something like: Firefox and Safari are now regarded as first class citizens. Quite a statement ;-)

But – getting down to the facts, we do actually now have a platform with less cluttered master pages and layouts – with better xHTML conformance and faster rendering, and for sure – better cross browser support.

So, generally speaking, when it comes to standards compliance and accessibility, there is much better support for WCAG 2.0 AA and across browsers. But, there is still some work to be done in this area. For instance there are still web parts that generate TABLE where you might expect a DIV.

Improved performance of variations,.... but alas, not at all where I had hoped multi-lingual content handling would be in SharePoint by now.

MUI (Multilingual User Interface) for localisation for Ribbon and controls.

My favourite improvements to WCM however include the following:

Edit Mode Only fields: There is now improved control of fields, such as "Edit Mode Only" fields, which for instance is useful for defining SEO metadata fields.

CQWP: The Content Query Web Part now has dynamic column based query support. Yes, finally! But, alas, it is still limited to the scope of one site collection.

Host headers: Host headers are supported on Site Collection level now which is great news when creating for instance a micro-site.

Much better support for rich media (images and video) including a great out of the box Silverlight skinable video player. It is now also easier to add images... you do not have to upload them into an image library first.

External lists: "An external list is a new feature in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 that enables accessing data from external systems in the same way that SharePoint list data is accessed. External lists use external content types as their data sources. External lists enable you to use the metadata that is already defined about an external content type to create a SharePoint list with external data that looks and performs like any other SharePoint list."

Built-in web analytics...

SEARCH

Products / Upgrade path

• Search Server Express
  
• SharePoint Search 2010 Standard
  
• FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
  

Search is evolving from the end users perspective. More focus now on being able to deliver "search based portals" where pages really are search results. For example a project pages, which really is the result of clicking on a search result list for "projects", and delivering a page with sub-searches, showing documents, pages, people, etc related to the project.

Common UI Framework

Common Connector Framework

Indexing connectors and better support for Open Search / Federated Search

Better support for languages

Personalised / contextualised search results

OTHER

(Imagine a drum roll here).... The Ribbon.... I am not sure if I am going to offend someone from Microsoft by adding a line about the ribbon here towards the end of this blog.

MS are very excited about the introduction of the Ribbon into SharePoint, and sure – it looks slick. Personally I am more excited about other stuff. BUT, to be fair, whether you like the actual ribbon or not – it has provided one major improvement. It is now obvious where most stuff can now be found: In the Ribbon!

With SPS2003 and MOSS 2007 it often felt like admin features, actions, etc were all over the place depending on what team had built the feature. If you hadn't used something for a while, there was a good chance you would forget where it was. This is been tidied up a lot and the ribbon now is a consistent – and context sensitive - place to go for most actions that you will need during your day to day management of items, lists, sites and more.

Some web parts can now be extended (Miguel/Richard will most likely post an article on this). For certain this includes many of the search web parts that can now be extended.

And what about the rest?

As you can see, I have not even touched on other big topics such as:

• Enhancements for developers
  
• Sandboxed solutions
  
• Composites
  
• SharePoint Workspace (aka Groove)
  
• BDC is now BCS (Business Connectivity Services)
  
• BI/Business Intelligence
  
• Social/Community computing
  
• And more...
  

Those topics that do fall inside our "core interest area" will for certain get some space in subsequent blogs,... but for now, that's all folks!

Technical Preview of Office 2010

Got it! So here we go. Recieved the "secret key" about 1 hour ago and have started downloading a bunch of files and resources. My goal is that we will start to review what's included (and more importantly what is not) more or less straight away.

More to follow... (especially when I find out what we can actually talk about, which might not be much).

/G

(nice article here btw: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3313 )

Posts from TheSharePointPeople blog

Opening post with a few back links to TheSharePointPeople blog:

17 May 2009
SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements
http://thesharepointpeople.blogspot.com/2009/05/sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary.html

24 April 2009
SharePoint Server 2010
http://thesharepointpeople.blogspot.com/2009/04/sharepoint-2010.html