News from Oct 29, 2009

ThreeWill had several associates attend the SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas and we also had associates at both the first SharePoint 2010 Ignite for IT Pros and the first SharePoint 2010 Ignite for IT Developers training in Atlanta.

We wanted to share the most important technologies in SharePoint 2010 as we see them, so we thought it would be fun to try to prioritize them. This is obviously quite subjective so we would love to hear your thoughts on this by commenting on this blog post.

The Top Ten

10. Powershell for SharePoint Administration - SharePoint now enables administration, diagnostics, log searching, configuration and so much more. If you can think of it, you can probably do it with SharePoint cmdlets. For developers SharePoint cmdlets can enable build enhancements, prototyping, test data generation and more. For IT Pros, PowerShell will help manage and diagnose issues with SharePoint farms. If you haven't learned PowerShell yet, now is the time to start!

9. Search - There have been several improvements in search including results refinement (aka faceted search, parametric search - it's about time!!!), OOTB wildcard search, new query terms (AND, OR, etc.), index redundancy (finally no more single point of failure in SharePoint!), and improved people search (nicknames and misspellings work, for example). FAST, an additional SKU, adds things like search enhancements based on user context, deep results refinement, and previewers.

8. SharePoint Workspace - We knew this was coming, Groove turning into a first class offline citizen of SharePoint. The support for pulling down metadata and InfoPath forms tied to a list is awesome. There will also be a mobile version of SharePoint Workspace - imagine the possibilities!

7. SharePoint Designer - SharePoint Designer is getting richer with being a viable mini-application builder. There is richer support for workflow. SharePoint Designer is now a first class citizen of the development life cycle - you can package up your changes into a WSP and import them into Visual Studio!

6. InfoPath Improvements and InfoPath for SharePoint UI - InfoPath forms as native SharePoint forms both on the web and when offline from within the SharePoint Workspace client. InfoPath is becoming the common form designer for forms that can be ported to SharePoint and SharePoint Workspace. Some other improvements include the ability to call REST services as a data connection and having "cascading dropdowns". There was plenty of room for improvement with InfoPath - we look forward to making use of them.

5. Service Application Architecture - Custom services as well as SharePoint OOTB services can now be shared among one more web applications, scaled out across one or more servers, and even shared across farms. Cross-farm services can be a great way to provide "services in the cloud" to SharePoint farms. As a company that does a lot of product integration with SharePoint, we see this as a big feature.

4. Sandboxed Solutions - The ability for IT to control SharePoint applications across the farm will allow for centralizing custom and OOTB SharePoint solutions to the same SharePoint Farm. This is not just for development environments - it is intended for production - and remove a lot of IT barriers to custom solutions by giving IT more control without sacrificing capability.

3. Reusable Workflows - Workflows can now be deployed independent of lists so they can be reused across lists and content types. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Workflow and SharePoint.

2. Enterprise Metadata & Social Feedback - Great to have concept of Open (bottoms up) and Closed (top down) tags. Ability to manage tags across all of SharePoint as either a formal taxonomy (closed tags) and/or a community driven folksonomy (open tags) allows an Enterprise to choose an appropriate strategy for tagging content in their enterprise so information can be searched and filtered appropriately. There are bookmarks, tagging, and ratings on content that will allow for building better social computing solutions.

1. BCS - Business Connectivity Services (formally BDC) is now part of the core of SharePoint Services. The capabilities are much deeper than the BDC of old. It allows for all CRUD operations and this is the answer to having a list stored in its own table (halleluiah!). It is really slick to see how a database table can look and act just like a list in SharePoint. This is what we all wanted to the BDC in MOSS 2007 to be - and now it is part of WSF (Windows SharePoint Foundation - the new name for WSS).

Honorable Mentions

Operations Management - Developer dashboard can be enabled to provide page level statistics.
Development on Windows 7 - Now you can use a standard client 64 bit OS for SharePoint development (Windows 7 and Vista SP1). This allows for trying things out without having to pull up a Virtual Machine or requiring to install a Server OS as your host OS.
Visual Studio 2010 Support - Includes visual designers for creating most SharePoint objects, can import SharePoint Designer WSP files for customization, can explore SharePoint servers using the server explorer, project template for creating custom business connectivity services connectors, supports sandboxed solution development, and developers can extend Visual Studio using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
AJAX, Silverlight, REST, and LINQ are all OOTB - this is huge! (dang, why didn't it make the list above???)
Claims Based Identity Management - single sign-on with other applications will get easier with claims based identity management. SAML is supported and there is a provider model to allow OpenID and others to be plugged in. SharePoint Online will use this to support Windows Live IDs.
Gemini - Sorting to 100 million rows in Excel in a few seconds... what else do I have to say. Not exactly a SharePoint technology, but definitely related.
External Data Exchange workflow activities allow direct interaction with external systems.
The client object model greatly simplifies access to SharePoint data for Silverlight, Windows, and JavaScript clients.

Thanks to Tommy, Eric, and Pete for heavily contributing to this post!