Lars Fastrup on SharePoint

The first day of TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles is wrapped up and there have been many great sessions here on everything but SharePoint. But I also came here to learn about other MS technologies and to network. However, being a SharePoint guy I still had my hopes up for learning just a little more what the SharePoint team in Redmond have cooking for the next version. Having to wait until the big SharePoint conference in October is a long wait for me.

Hence I went to the OFC202 session (MOSS 2007: Overview and Roadmap) presented by General Manager Thomas Rizzo. Unfortunately the session was more Overview than Roadmap making it quite boring with an overweight of old stuff. But Thomas was not in a position to reveal many details about the roadmap for SharePoint 2010. Nevertheless, I made a note of the few things he could say and will share this in a moment along with a few more news I picked up elsewhere

A very funny thing happened in another and later non SharePoint session that I attended. The presenters here actually used the new SharePoint 2010 in a few parts of their demo, giving us a quick glimpse of the new UI in SharePoint 2010. Let it be unsaid what session this was - I'm sure they might otherwise get shot by someone in the SharePoint team!

With all this fresh in mind, let me share with you what I do know about the next SharePoint:

Release Information

• The official name is Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Yes, Office has been removed from the name as it must only refer to the Office client apps. But there is no official acronym for it yet as MSS is already taken by the Microsoft Search Server product.
• RTM in H1 2010. Pretty vague commitment if you ask me - but this is actually what Thomas had on the slides today.
• CTP in July 2009. The is good news and I will be looking forward to seeing some bits.

System Requirements

• SharePoint 2010 will be a 64-bit only release. I think this is a sound decision as 32-bit makes little sense anymore.
• SQL Server 2005/2008 64-bit. SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 32-bit are not supported.
• Internet Explorer 7+ , IE6 not supported.

General News

• Rewamped UI with a Web enabled Ribbon control to align it more with the Office clients.
• More use of Silverlight controls.
• Support for mapping lists to their own database tables, offering better performance and scalability on large SharePoint lists. This is actually no big secret as this was already announced at the SharePoint 2008 conference.
• CMIS support to enable SharePoint to interact with other CMS systems and vice versa.
• Painless upgrade. The SharePoint team is investing a lot to deliver a smooth upgrade experience. But it also seems the architecture does not fundamentally change as it did from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. However, I need to see this for myself before believing it.

Search News

• Faceted Search. Thomas did not say anything about this - but you can be sure this will be included OOTB in SP2010.
• FAST Search for SharePoint. A new version of FAST Search for SharePoint at a lower cost.
• The SharePoint team have scrapped their efforts to make the SharePoint search engine scale beyond 50 million documents in a single index. The argument will be to move to the FAST search engine instead.

News on Development Tools

• Visual Studio 2010 will ship with comprehensive support for developing Web parts, features, solutions, content types, etc.
• VS 2010 will among other things ship with a visual Web part designer
• You can now build, deploy and debug SharePoint applications directly from VS. Just hit F5 to deploy and start debugging your Web Part - now that is cool!
• New server explorer inside Visual Studio that lets you explore sites, lists, documents and other SharePoint objects.

SharePoint SharePoint 2010, News, TechEd

Here is a great new and very cool site for software developers. It lets developers ask and answer questions about any relevant software development topic. I really like the way Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky designed and implemented this site. The user interface is really slick and responsive and full of cool features. A really nice difference from the usual annoying developer forums is the ability to edit your questions and answers anytime. Gain a good reputation and you can even edit the questions of other people.

But most importantly, you very often get good answers from top specialist very fast and for free!! I am there helping out on topics like SharePoint, .Net and C# when I have time. However, the momentum on the SharePoint topic is yet to become significant. Hence this post to help spread the message to more SharePoint developers.

Go and check out www.stackoverflow.com

SharePoint, General SharePoint

I was just pointed to this great posting about deploying solution packages in Windows SharePoint Services V3. It covers the essentials of what it means to deploy solution packages.

SharePoint SharePoint

SharePoint MVP Rob Bogue has recently published a new book The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users. It contains excellent and detailed step-by-step guides with good screen shots to many of the tasks you need to know how to do right in SharePoint.

SharePoint SharePoint, Documentation