| The SharePoint Workspace and other changes increase SharePoint's speed. The Microsoft SharePoint conference in October was a fun week filled with excitement and high quality presentations about SharePoint 2010. At the time of the conference, SharePoint 2010 was in beta, but every presenter used it in live demonstrations, and it was available in a lab for all attendees. It worked well, and the heavy use by Microsoft and the use of the beta by additional companies makes me feel secure that when Microsoft releases the product, the vast functionality will work flawlessly for the average user. If you were to make a list of the top 10 common limitations people have with SharePoint 2007, SP2010 has addressed them all, and added some new surprises. In this article, I’ll focus on one thing that should be a favorite for everyone. Response time improvements in SP2010 will create an overall fast user experience when interacting with SharePoint sites. This happens for two reasons: First, the interface has more script that runs from the browser without doing full page refreshes. This means entering an item or updating its column data can happen within a fraction of a second of your mouse click. Of course, web pages still load and data comes from the server, but more data comes faster, and there are much fewer waits for pages relatively speaking. The second and more exciting way to increase speed is the client-side SharePoint Workspace. This runs on your local PC and allows you to edit and read information from SharePoint. To understand the tool, it helps to think of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook uses the computing power of your local machine to respond to your keyboard commands and mouse clicks instantaneously. It is easy and it works offline. For most people, the web-based nature of SharePoint is a big barrier to SharePoint adoption. It is so much easier to type up an email to share information than to navigate to a SharePoint site and wait for the correct page to appear. The SharePoint Workspace synchronizes your SharePoint sites to your local PC. It provides a logical breakdown in an intuitive 3 column view that shows your sites, then lists and document libraries, then content of the selected list item or document. Indicators appear next to lists, libraries, and folders that contain new items. Not only does this allow people to add and edit SharePoint data with no response time lags, it solves the off-line worker problem. Now when I am travelling –whether to a place without a Starbuck’s wi-fi hotspot or on an airplane, I can still access the volumes of data that my projects and workgroups have generated and stored in a SharePoint site. It saves a huge amount of work. Once a person finds the SharePoint Workspace necessary or valuable for reading offline, it will be natural for that person to add information there or edit items. Email will feel inadequate, as it will be obvious that email separates small chunks of information from the main information center. It can be very motivating to put information in SharePoint once you start to realize that is where your ideas and hard work will get the most recognition. |
| Word has it that the SharePoint 2010 beta 2 for both Foundations and Server editions will be released this week. |
| Based on what we've seen this week I think companies upgrading to SharePoint 2010 are going to get the most value from either the Metadata Management Service which allows you to manage your metadata across site collections, web apps and farms. It will be much easier for organizations to manage this centralized repository of tagging terms and standardize on the values across their organizations. This will be a big one for large enterprises. The Social features are going to change the way organizations communicate internally. The expertise search is fantastic and I will be blogging on thesee features in detail over the next several weeks. The Business Connectivty Services (BCS) is another powerful. Formally the Business Data Catal (BDC), The BCS will allow us to connect to external data repositories including 3rd party employee profile data sources and quickly pull that information into SharePoint 2010 and integrate with other data already existing in SharePoint 2010. |
| This is a great new product that fills a huge gap in client needs. SharePoint adoption should improve if people have fast client access. Hopefully it will be just as easy and fast to put content into sharepoint now as it is to email it! Here are my rough notes (in a handy stream-of-conciousness format) from a recent session on the tool. SharePoint Workspace Client- The SharePoint workspace has same ribbon as online site; ...The content area has 3 panes – your lists and libraries, folders next, then documents or items. A cool feature is it marks what lists have unread items.; ...SharePoint launchbar is a bookmark of your favorite SharePoint sites.; ...The “BackSpace” – some statistics about latest sync, and more; ...The SharePoint workspace will attempt to sync via both an intranet and an extranet URL.; ...SharePoint workspace sync’s all views including your personal views; ...Offline: You can save docs to the SharePoint workspace. If you do this, they’ll be local and sync later; ...SharePoint workspace shows when there are multiple document editors. Office apps also show this. When multi-user authoring happens while both are online, it has features to help you avoid save conflicts. Word supports auto –merge.; ...Document protocol via soap over http allows them to send chunks of docs at a time over the network.; ...Lists in SharePoint Workspace have a preview pane. Infopath does the preview pane; ...She demo’ed how to resovlve conflicts when two people edit the same list item in sp workspace. It showed the 2 people at the top, with a checkbox to be able to pick which version to look back. Disappointing that it’s not side-by-side or red-lined.; ...All the functionality from Groove that worked with SP2007 is available. But behind the scenes, it doesn’t use WebDav, it uses the new technology described below; ...If your permission to the SP site changes and your access is taken away, sync will stop, but you’ll have the content locally still.; ...You can’t create a new document set.; ...Version history can be viewed in SPW; ...Within SPW, you can create 2 kinds of workspaces: Groove Workspace and SharePoint Workspace. They are 2 types. Groove WS is for peer-to-peer collaboration. At server level, you can set policies to control what workspace types are available (ie, block groove workspaces) Architecture – sync and storage SPW – the SharePoint workspace datastore. Stored in SPW’s own relational database. There is also a datastore called ODC (Office Document Con?).; ...BCS – has local data store for external systems. Used by SPW and other systems.; ...When you create a local Workspace, you ask the server for the site – lists, schema, views, & content.; ...The user sends back content. Cannot add or edit lists or views from the workspace.; ...There is automatic sync on pre-determined frequency. If workspace is open in the UI it is sync’ed every 10 minutes. If workspace is closed in UI, it’s every 20 minutes.; ...The sync schedule will be automatically reduced based on a server health score. If the score gets to 5 or above (on scale of 0-10), the sync schedule will slow down.; ...Client-side edits are sync’ed immediately up to server; ...When client opens a list, if it hasn’t been sync’ed recently, SPW will sync immediately.; ...If your datastore gets too large, SPW will stop syncing and tell you.; ...Fast, anytime, anywhere access to your collaborative SharePoint content!!! ; ...Capacity planning – they don’t think this is going to affect the server infra planning but they are still testing this. It may be a trade off where the extra sync calls are balanced by fewer online actual server visits by the user. The product is in the ProPlus SKU of SharePoint. |
| SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to do cascading deletes of parent and child. The deleted entities will go to the recycle bin together, and then will be restored together. This is a major benefit when building custom applications on SHarePoint 2010 that require the use of multiple entities to store data. |
| SharePoint Designer 2010 provides the best method for modifying MySites in SharePoint 2010. It can be used to create customer master pages to drive the structure of the site. The ability to modify sharepoint sites including MySites though in SharePoint 2010 will come down to CSS in 2010. That's it. Master pages leverage the CSS for all the branding because Microsoft has removed most of the inline styles that you maybe accustomed to in previous versions of SharePoint. SharePoint Design 2010 will be required. Microsoft says that it will continue to be free in 2010. SharePoint Designer 2007 can NOT be used to modify SharePoint 2010 sites. Sprites are also used inside of 2010. This is probably the biggest branding related improvement when going from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. A CSS Sprite is essentially a file that you can stick all of the images used in your site into which get loaded one time by the server and client. This significantly reduces the number of times that you will need to go back to the server to load the images which will have big performance benefits for your SharePoint 2010 server. Another major customization related change that will impact your MySite cuistomization efforts is that the html tables are gone from your *.master pages. They now use DIV tags almost exclusively throughout SharePoint 2010. Happy Branding! |
| New with Sharepoint 2010, you can configure SQL failover servers for content databases through the configuration UI and by using Powershell for the configuration databases. It also supports automatic failover between mirrors when mirroring is used. No need to manually failover. |
| "Load Test Kit 2010" will ship as part of the Sharepoint 2010 Administration kit for capacity planning of your implementations. The diagnostic/usage analysis logging is moved from the file sytem to its own database. This will improve the ability to report on performance and usage. |
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