As anticipated Microsoft have made good on their promise to launch SharePoint & Office 2010 to the public in the first half of 2010. The official launch date is now confirmed to be May 12th. ProActive are already well under way to delivering SharePoint 2010 solutions to a number of our clients and look forward with anticipation to the official launch.

For more information on SharePoint 2010 please see here. For demos or more information about how ProActive can deliver cutting edge enterprise solutions on the SharePoint 2010 platform please feel free to contact Mikkel Aude or Victor Schwartz Keegan for more information.

Højhastighedskomiteen, KL og IT – og telestyrelsen har store ambitioner på det offentliges vegne. Dette fremgår bl.a. af rapporter fra Højhastighedskomiteen og IDC samt nylig afholdt konference i IT-og telestyrelsen.

Det er interessante tal, der kommer frem – bl.a. estimerer IDC en potentiel besparelse på op mod 55 % i strøm og 50 % på generelle IT – omkostninger ved overgang fra egen drift til cloud computing.  Disse tal gælder både for offentlige og private virksomheder og rapporterne er således interessant læsning for ledere i både private og offentlige virksomheder.

Rapporterne har da også givet anledning til en del omtale i Børsen og andre medier og denne artikel vil forsøge at give en ekstrakt af de vigtigste synspunkter og undersøgelser.

Højhastighedskomissionens rapport og anbefalinger
Kommissionen blev nedsat af Videnskabsministeriet i foråret 2009 og fremlagde den 14 januar rapporten ”Danmark som Højhastighedssamfund”.

Udover et overordnet og meget konkret forslag om bredbånd med 50 Mbit/s downstream og 10 Mbit/s upstream til mindst 80 pct til alle og 10 Mbit/s downstream og 5 Mbit/s upstream til de resterende borgere og virksomheder i 2013,  indeholdt rapporten en række spændende forslag der kan læses i fuld længde her.

I relation til cloud computing finder komiteen, at der er betydelige økonomiske som miljømæssige gevinster ved øget brug af cloud computing. Blandt andet kan cloud computing være med til at bane vejen for opstartsvirksomheder og innovation ved blandt andet at sænke etableringsomkostningerne og driftsomkostninger. Se eksempelvis www.podcastmachine.com.

Komitteen anbefaler således, at det offentlige satser massivt på cloud computing og er med til at løse udfordringer i forhold til privacy, datasikkerhed m.v.*

IDC – rapporten “Potential Server and Datacenter CO2 Savings in Denmark”
Komiteens anbefalinger baserer sig I høj grad på en rapport fra IDC, der blev udarbejdet i oktober 2009. Rapporten er på 33 sider og kan downloades her. Rapporten indeholder en række interessante statements som følger:

- Hvis alle servere i Danmark virtualiseres i størst mulig grad – i egne eller delte datacentre – vil energiforbruget kunne reduceres med op til 33 procent sammenlignet med i dag.

- Ud over gevinsten ved det lavere CO2-udslip, vil omkostningerne til elektricitet og hardware
kunne reduceres med 22 procent i 2013, hvilket svarer til mere end en halv mia. kr.

- Ved brug af kommercielle cloud-tjenester kan der ske yderligere rationaliseringer, så strømforbruget kan reduceres med op til 55 procent sammenlignet med i dag.

I relation til sidstnævnte oplysning tager IDC dog det forbehold, at tallet kan variere alt efter hvor de cloud baserede datacentre henter deres strøm fra. Eksempelvis drives Microsofts nyeste driftscenter i Irland CO2 netralt med anvendelse af alternative energikilder.

IDC rapporten berører også de generelle omkostninger ved egen drift ctr. cloud computing. Med støtte fra en rapport fra Intel  i april 2009, vurderer IDC således, at de totale IT omkostninger ved traditionel drift er ca. 5 X større end selve hardwareudgifterne, hvorimod det i store driftscentre kan reduceres til en faktor 2. IDC konkluderer derfor forsigtigt, at selvom det ikke er alle interne IT – omkostninger, der kan elimineres ved at flytte driften til cloud computing, så vil de samlede omkostninger kunne sænkes med 50 % !

Cloud computing i det offentlige – konference den 13 januar arrangeret af IT – og telestyrelsen og KL
Alle indlæg og programmet fra konferencen kan ses og downloades her, men blandt indlæggene kan fremhæves:
Martin Bellamy, direktør for den britiske regerings Office of the Government CIO & SIRO. MB havde ansvar for at samle alle landets servere i få driftscentre med henblik på at opbygge en offentlig, men national cloud, der kunne forsyne både myndigheder, borgere og virksomheder med relevante applikationer (apps). Kontorets foreløbige beregninger indikerede som hos IDC,  at der lå en besparelse på ikke under 50 % rent IT – mæssigt.

Konsulent Mikkel Hald fra KL var ligeledes meget varm fortaler for Cloud Computing og mente også, at det kun var et spørgsmål om 5 år før de første kommuner helt havde nedlagt deres egne servere og lagt deres services/applikationer op i skyen. De første myndigheder var i gang og eksempler fra Københavns kommune og IT – og Telestyrelsen blev gennemgået.

Senior forsker Jacob I. Pagter fra Alexandrainstituttet fremhævedede også de potentielle besparelser og henviste bl.a. til en nyere undersøgelse fra Berkeley i 2009 - Ambrust " Above the Clouds", hvori det konkluderes at store driftscentre kan spare omkostninger med helt op til faktor 7 i forhold til mindre og mere traditionelle driftscentre.

ProActives forventninger til cloud computing
Hos Proactive følger vi udviklingen tæt og etablerede i 2009 vor egen afdeling for Cloud Computing med focus på Microsoft Online Services. Vi ser et væld af nye onlineservices komme frem fra både Microsoft, Google, Amazon og andre udbydere og rådgiver flere og flere af vore kunder indenfor den offentlige og private sektor omkring mulighederne for at supplere eller erstatte eksisterende services og servere med cloud baserede services.

Senest har vi bl.a. udviklet værktøjer til cost/benefit beregninger ved overgang til cloud computing og har generelt gode erfaringer med at implementere cloud services, bl.a. indenfor SharePoint, Exchange, Communication Server, Live Meeting og CRM.

Det er p.t. ikke alle applikationer og forretningsservices, der kan afvikles via cloud computing, men  sikkerheds – og driftsniveau er højt og vi vurderer i dag altid cloud computing som et alternativ til drift på egne servere.
For interesserede i cloud computing afholder vi i øvrigt 4 ”Breakfastmeetings” i Århus og København i nærmeste fremtid. Deltagelse er gratis men kræver dog tilmelding. Læs mere om program og tidspunkter i januar, februar og april her eller kontakt Peter Lunding Smith på pls@proactive.dk eller telefon 40 20 43 34.

* Se supplerende udtalelser fra Højhastighedskomissionen på  http://www.youtube.com/user/HHkomiteen#g/u  hvor kommiteens medlemmer udtaler sig og  på http://vtu.dk/nyheder/aktuelle-temaer/2010/ugens-tal/cloud-computing-miljoe-og-oekonomi  hvor Videnskabsministeriet  drøfter Cloud Computings betydning for miljø og økonomi.

Virksomheder og organisationer vælger i stigende grad at understøtte videndeling og kommunikation gennem én eller flere hostede services.

Siden Microsoft lancerede de første tilbud om hosting af bl.a. mail, intranet, ekstranet, videomøder og instant messaging i efteråret 2008 i USA, har mange kunder og partnere taget godt imod de nye services. Microsoft beretter således, at mere end 1,5 mio. brugere nu er tilknyttet Microsoft Online Services og i Danmark er over 120 kunder nu i gang.

Tilsvarende har også Google og IBM gang i udviklingen af nye services til professionelt brug og navnlig Google holder konkurrenterne til ilden med bl.a. lancering af Goggle Wave i betaversion.

ProActive har fulgt udviklingen tæt og har siden lanceringen af MS Online været med i den kreds af Microsoft Partnere, der har haft særlig fokus på udvikling og implementering af online services som supplement eller alternativ til drift på egne servere.

Senior Business Consultant Peter Lunding Smith har således beskæftiget sig med Online Services i en årrække og er er den rådgiver i DK, der har medvirket til flest implementeringer af MS Online i danske virksomheder og organisationer.

”Vi ser nu for alvor at virksomheder og organisationer er begyndt at se fordelene ved at benytte Online Services fremfor at afvente omkostningstunge interne projekter. Vi har navnlig i Q4 medvirket til en række spændende projekter i forskellige virksomheder indenfor bl.a. juridisk rådgivning, revision og shipping og vores pipeline er vokset betydeligt.”

”I 2010 forventer vi for alvor at Online Service får et gennembrud i takt med lanceringen af Office 2010 og SharePoint 2010 til både website og intranet. I lighed med Google docs, vil brugerne kunne anvende deres Officeapplikationer via en webudgave men også offline via deres sædvanlige klientprogram og det giver en hidtil uset mobilitet og tilgængelighed. Samtidig er funktionaliteten fuldt på niveau med afvikling af programmerne på egne servere, og vores foreløbige cost benefit analyser viser klart at Online Services er billigere end drift på egne servere.”

”Der er skarp konkurrence på både pris og funktionalitet imellem Google, Microsoft og IBM, hvilket kommer kunderne til gode. Eksempelvis er Exchange Online sat ned til 33 kr. per bruger per måned, samtidig med at brugerens lager er udvidet fra 5 GB til 25 GB. Tilsvarende er der en rivende udvikling i gang af nye applikationer til bl.a. SharePoint, hvor det centralt styrede miljø giver partnere og udviklere verden over mulighed for at skubbe deres ”apps” ud til en bred kreds af kunder.”

CRM Solution Manager Brian Sølvsteen fra ProActives konsulentafdeling, kan nikke genkendende til den nye trend.

”På CRM – området ser vi flere og flere leverandører, der satser på at forestå drift og vedligeholdelse, samtidig med at de kan levere en tæt integration til kundens egne databaser og systemer. Et godt eksempel er f.eks Salesforce,  der var blandt pioneerne indenfor webbaserede CRM – systemer, men som nu også tilbyder Salesforce ”Apps” til mobilbrugere. Samme udvikling fortsætter nu på Microsoft CRM 4.0 hvor flere og flere begynder at udvikle produkter til mobile CRM brugere.”

”Microsoft er kommet godt med i førerfeltet med CRM 4.0 , der kan både købes og lejes for helt ned til 350 kr. per måned. Og allerede i slutningen af Q1-2010 vil vi kunne tilbyde en hosting pris på 198 kr. per måned, som et yderligere økonomisk argument for at vælge hosting af virksomhedens data."

Hos ProActive har samtlige medarbejdere adgang til Communicator, Live Meeting og CRM som hostede online services og der har hidtil ikke været komplikationer eller driftsforstyrrelser.

ProActive vil holde kunder og samarbejdspartnere opdateret om udviklingen og gennemgå de nyeste services, udvalgte specialløsninger og kundecases fra ind – og udland på en række møder gennem 2010.

De første møder med arbejdstitlen ”Do more with less” finder sted på følgende tid – og sted:

København 2. februar og 7. april kl. 09.30 til 11.30

Århus 4. februar og 8. april kl. 10.00 til 12.00

Tilmelding eller ønske om yderlige information om mulighederne med Online Services kan ske ved henvendelse til  Peter Lunding Smith på pls@proactive.dk eller Brian Sølvsteen på brians@proactive.dk

ProActive Consulting – december 2009

Steve Tullis and Charlie Ellis gave a session on the new and advanced Excel and Excel Services in 2010. The room was packed and people very enthusiastic. Rounds of applause every 5 minutes.

 
To put it into perspective he once again told of the decision they made leading up to 2007: that Excel, which were the business users' favorite tool, should not just be somewhere that data ended up, but THE place to go for Business Intelligence. Excel has become a client for BI and a service.

 
Vision for Excel 2010:

• User experience - Excel Everywhere: increased collaboration capabilities, across pc, browser and phone, bring ideas to live...
• Analysis - More flexible Business Intelligence
• Extensibility - Better integrated platform for BI

He then quickly skipped to the demo and showcased some pretty breathtaking scenarios:

• SharePoint dashboard with current data and graphs on all day-to-day business activities (the whole dashboard was build in Excel)
• Even in the browser the dashboard is interactive and allows for drilldowns etc
• He opens the spreadsheet in Excel and it renders completely as the dashboard - 2010 now support advanced layout, pictures etc etc (if a spreadsheet contains formating that Excel services cannot handle it will no longer be discarded, but instead the parts that cannot be rendered are ignored)
• In Excel they added search to the filters! So that if you have loads of data with different properties you don't have to scroll through an impossible list of properties to filter, you can search for properties directly within the properties dialogue - with millions of data lines the search utilizes an OLAP source
• Awesome ability to build and package logic based on data sets and MDX queries and use these across spreadsheet, OLAP cube, server etc
  Using named sets makes it possible to enable intelligent filtering in pivottables, so that you can correlate or disregard columns without having to have all columns in the there or compare data across different filters (compare 2008 realized revenue to 2009 forecast and disregard 2008 forecast and 2009 realized was one example)
• Filters from pivottables and named sets are accessible in Excel services to allow for dynamic cross filtering in the browser - looks almost like search based facets to allow for dynamic filtering of displayed data
• Ability to build "slicers" instead of pivot tables so that you can easlity build dashboard with predifined ability to slice data based on properties selected by the designer - as powerful as pivot tables, but much more usable for casual users
• Along the same lines you are able to make a pivottable look like a querytable and use all the usual features (filtering, sorting etc)
• Ability to extend Excel services features using Javascript and REST - in essence making it very easy to build interactive online BI applications

And much more - it was pretty exhausing so at one point I just had to quit typing and try and keep up.............. many of the last scenarios was based on REST and the possibilities that this gives in terms of developing powerful interactive apps that draws on OLAP data and Excel features with very little javascript code...

Bottomline: Microsoft are really pushing the envelope on Excel for BI and today you are able to do stuff that you would never have thought possible a few years ago. BI for the masses...

 
Gorm Priem

Microsofts outset is the fact that Document Management is changing... from a stand alone structured environment to manage document we are now dealing with multiple content types, advanced search, multiple client types, unstructured collaboration etc... Managing and working with documents is part of a much larger space regarding collaboration - formally and informally - on producing and later finding information/content.

 
Microsofts core ECM messages on the SharePoint platform:

• Easy to use
• Everyone participates
• Enterprise Ready

In short: ECM for the masses. User friendly, engaging and scaleable.
 

As for 2010 the following new or improved features was presented:

• Ribbon interface (of course)
• Document Center - a site template for huge document libraries (100000s of items) with a strict management model ("content steward")
• Document sets - an ability to work with multiple document as one set with common metadata and workflows etc (could support doing document with appendices, business cases which consists of multiple document, project descriptions etc - very often a document deliverable in fact consists of multiple documents)
• Document Sets also supports document set landing page, collected versions, collected templates etc
• Unique Document ID's across site collections (based on settings for format etc)
• Centrally managed metadata and content types across site collections!!!
• Support for taxonomi (centrally managed) AS WELL AS "folksonomy" (decentral/community based metatags) - great flexibility for localizations, dialogue with metadata managers, workflows, multi-lingual taxonomies etc
• Location based metadata defaults can automate much of the work of filling in metadata
• Hierarchical metadata terms
• Filtering repositories based on metadata terms, drill down/up
• Ratings - social context and evaluation in relation to Documents (show me the information that my collegues find most valuable)
• Improved interface for adding multiple documents (drag and drop)
• Ability to select multiple documents
• Move or copy documents across libraries and sites
• Records management is not confined to a Records center, but can be an integrated part of the Document Management experience (that is really a great improvement which will mean that the Record management features will actually be used)
• Setting up information management policies, which can automate lifecycles and workflows based on document library or document center settings (this really takes Governance to a new and more pragmatic level - let's not just describe it, let's automate it!)
• And then some...

We still may need to do some plumming around aggregations, faceted search etc, but all in all I am confident that a SharePoint pure play strategy will enable us to deliver very comprehensive and usable solutions. I think it is a pretty good combination of improvements to user experience and new smart businessdriven features. The combination of structured content management and informal collaboration features is very convincing and also pretty unique to SharePoint.

 
Tomorrow I will attend an in depth session on the new Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM) which is one of the single most promising new features in SharePoint which will take ECM to a whole new level.

Gorm Priem

As you might expect this is another Microsoft conference where the "cloud" or "online" is being mentioned in every second sentence... I think by now we are getting the message: there may be huge benefits in moving all or some part of your it infrastructure to the "cloud" and thereby reduce the level of daily it hazzle...

 
As with anything Microsoft things really takes off with version 2. For version 1 of SharePoint Online the Exhange and Communications cloud services were a no brainer as these are pretty standardized services. The SharePoint service however was scaled way down and with virtually no or very little opportunity for customization. Not a scenario that appeals to that many who are serious about SharePoint.

 
With SharePoint 2010 this changes drastically. Within a Standard subscription (for corporation with more than 5 employees) you will get nearly a full SharePoint experience and you are alowed to customize and even deploy some code!

 
This is possible due to the whole new context/sandbox development features in SharePoint which effectively seperates contexts in a multi-tenance environment. This means that bad code in one solution will not take down another even if the run on the same server. Also Microsoft provides very impressive debugging tools alllowing them to shut down bad components on the fly and report back on exactly what is going on in terms of database connections, SharePoint calls, etc etc.

 
Of course you also have the Dedicated scenario which is almost the same as buying a dedicated server at a hosting provider meaning that you have full freedom with the platform.

 
I am sure that this will mean that many larger corporation will (and should!) seriously consider SharePoint Online as a scenario for fully or partially running there SharePoint installations.

 
Did I mention that SharePoint Online also will come in a SharePoint Online for Internet targeting at providing web solutions? Oh, yeah! This should be a very interesting scenario for future WCMS investments.

 
Gorm Priem

This is the last session of the day and the conference in general. Before this session I attended the Architectural Guidance session. It was so packed there was standing room only and my line of sight to the presentation was obscured so I will blog about it later on.

In these tough economic times many companies are trying to extend the value out of older systems instead of purchasing newer ones. Consolidation is key and using SharePoint 2010 to expose those products and services is a cost effective way of giving new life to older products. The presentation is done by Donald Farmer and Kevin Idzi from Microsoft.

The real focus is on using SSIS (SQL Server Integrations Services) to get data into and out of SharePoint 2010. Any developer can add on to the SSIS connector. Some of the challenges faced today are that business needs are constantly changing and data is locked into business applications – it’s meeting those needs and getting the right data out that needs to be overcome. SSIS has native providers for Oracle, SAP, TeraData etc. It’s impressive how Unstructured, Legacy and Application data can be integrated via SSIS in SQL Server 2008. Data Profiling in SSIS is really interesting and means that profiles can be carried out on tables to see what activity is happening there. Microsoft have recently purchased a company called Zoomix and that will allow for a self learning Data profiling system – coming next year.

The first example was the Data Silo problems. Geographic legacy apps from Asia, Europe and North America were used as examples. In the example the way to bring them together was to use the SharePoint Centralized Information Store. The construct demo was inspiring, Kevin used a Data Flow task to connect to a SQL datasource and then pulled in a SharePoint 2010 List as the destination. The property set was very rich and the SPList component is available now on CodePlex! Column Mappings and so on were a breeze and the result was a list, populated directly from SSIS into SharePoint without any solution deployment.

The next demo talked about an Agile world when tying in to Legacy Applications. This was a much more complex data flow but none the less very good. The 3 regional legacy apps where unioned, sorted, joined and then checked for compliance. SSIS uses the SharePoint Webservices API and therefore there is no transactional support for lists. A Non-compliance list was populated with 765 items in 18 seconds. The session dug down into making a custom connector and again the example shown is available on Codeplex.

This was a great session and good way to finish off the week here. There is a big potential for companies to integrate their legacy systems (HR, Time Registration etc) into SharePoint 2010 without sacrificing functionality or business logic and this will be a big driver for future growth in the integration segment.

Mvh Victor

______________________________________________________
ProActive A/S

microsoft partner of the year, information worker, 2008

Victor Keegan
Strategic Architect

It’s the first session of the last day of this conference and it’s the first session I have had the opportunity to attend regarding SharePoint 2010 Online. The presenters ran through comparisons of Online vs On-Premises hosting. One of the great things was the one-way trust that can be established between customer and Microsoft datacenters.

The first customer case was British insurance company Aviva. They used key features such as Team Sites, My Sites and blogging. Microsoft Consulting Services was engaged directly for this project. As the company progresses they will use BI, Social networking and more. One of the arguments for using SharePoint online was the quick time to launch. Aviva themselves believe that if they had tried to host this themselves they would be 10 months delayed in getting launched. The customization of the solution was really impressive. Everything from personalized navigation to custom controls were added. This just goes to show that SharePoint Online can be just as flexible as an on-premises solution.

Aviva’s Online platform was not all smooth sailing. There were some performance issues with caching and the publishing of pages. Ultimately the NLB was set not to use single affinity and support for variations is still on hold until it can be predictably deployed and used. Challenges aside the platform was regarded as a big success.

The next case study was Coca-Cola. Again the screens were really important and served to show that the online offering is not as limited as some people would think. They have deployed a high number of customizations and retired 800 web applications. There is a lot of enthusiasm from current Online clients for SharePoint 2010. The goal for Microsoft is to move all of the on-premise features into the cloud. Features for SharePoint 2010 Online that won’t be available are Email Enabled lists, Site Definitions and Inline code. The first 2 are quite confusing as custom site definitions are literally everywhere. It seems the cat is out of the bag and that SharePoint 2010 will be available in April.

Claims based authentication and Remote Blob storage using Azure are also in the works and will be coming after launch in April. The feature summary for the online dedicated offering is quite extensive and will be fully rounded by April 2011 (Geo-distributed design). What’s really impressive is that prior to deployment companies will have to handover a HLD (High Level Design) document to Microsoft so that can review and suggest how the code should be built. This quality assurance and guidance that is seldom found with any other hosting provider.

An ISV solutions marketplace is also in the works so that preapproved solutions can be resold online. Productization of solutions is the next big trend and a marketplace like this could be a gold mine for developers and customers alike. April 2010 is inline with Microsofts release schedule so we can expect SharePoint 2010 to hit the market in that time J

______________________________________________________
ProActive A/S

microsoft partner of the year, information worker, 2008  

Victor Keegan
Strategic Architect

Social development on SharePoint 2010 is fun and beats building timesheet applications ;) Social applications are in high demand today and Microsoft have really focused on the Social side of development for SharePoint 2010 which can be seen throughout the session overview for this conference in Las Vegas. The workforce today is more Social savvy, social applications are easily adopted and most employees are willing to share the knowledge they gain internally or out in the field.

“Social” doesn’t conflict with business but is in fact in line with business because at the end of the day it means people connecting with people. A properly adopted Social application can in fact increase a company’s earnings. This doesn’t mean that every business on the planet should be doing social – if a company’s business model is bad to begin with then social won’t help them. Some examples of bad social initiatives were given including an anecdotal story of 3500 people at the gates of a party crushing it via Twitter because they couldn’t get in. The discussion delved a lot into SharePoint as a platform with the requisite nods to Blogs, Wikis and Publishing.

People data out of the box is really good. The activity feed, tags, comments and the social data service mean that users in an organization can keep updated on what their colleagues are doing at any time.  The more I see the new My Sites in SharePoint 2010 being presented the more I realize just how much work Microsoft have put into this functionality. The Silverlight demo application consumed the UserProfileService and I could see how rich the object model is. I can envision many applications like the demo being built for companies where users could have a Silverlight desktop app (like a Twitter client) which would enable them to get the latest status and activity info on any colleague.

The new Social Data service is impressive and features just as rich an object model as the UserProfileService. In the example presented a link to an image was passed to the service and it returned the 5 latest tags associated with that image. Having services to tap into Social data is a big development for SharePoint and custom applications or web parts can do all sorts of data manipulation through the social data service. The Client Object Model was also discussed and the demo showed a Silverlight webpart that would get all the Shared Pictures for a profile.   

The rest of the demos are really compelling and if you have the possibility to login to the SPC site and see the video of the presentation then please do so.

Microsoft aren’t just paying lip service to the Social aspects of SharePoint 2010. What am I seeing and have seen is simply fantastic and I’m personally quite surprised at how much investment they have put into this side of SharePoint 2010. I heartily recommend all of our customers to begin investigating the social aspects of SharePoint 2010 now – the benefits and the gains to be made are obvious!

Mvh Victor

______________________________________________________
ProActive A/S

microsoft partner of the year, information worker, 2008

Victor Keegan
Strategic Architect

This is one of the big sessions of the week and takes up a large hall here in Vegas. The presentation is by Todd Bleeker and Paul Schaeflein from Microsoft.

The session is going to cover all the ways to get your data into and out of SharePoint. The idea is to give an overview of what technology should be used for particular data tasks. The data technologies available from client to server includes new REST APIs, a client OM, the data platform itself, the server OM and LINQ. The data platform in scope covers the file system, Lists, Query and External lists. The List data model, not really new to most, can have relational integrity which also includes a cascade delete triggering. Validation and Uniqueness is new to the List data model.

The large list support now has query throttling which is a big deal in that developers can overcome or enforce throttling for end users. The List demo was really cool and highlighted the new functionality such as column projection and the means of enforcing cascade behavior. One of the demos showed 6000 items in a list being returned instantly. It’s only the aggregate being returned for the initial view and then click down expands details. This is a great improvement.

The Client OM is pretty powerful and at the same time has some obvious limitations being based on Javascript. The example for the client control was based on Yahoo! Treeview and from an application page in the layouts folder worked flawlessly. The code for the demo was really straightforward and the code is available for download now. I was really impressed at what can be done client side and the demo, although not a deep dive, was really well done. The opportunities for building custom client side apps for an organization are numerous and I expect that the Client OM will be a big success in SharePoint 2010.

Consuming a REST webservice in SharePoint 2010 is a snap. One of the demos showed that a correctly formatted URI could retrieve almost any kind of information out of SharePoint. The REST API exposes a lot of functionality and is ideal for remotely retrieving information from SharePoint 2010. The REST demo itself was against the same list data as was used for the previous demo. The resultset of a REST query was returned in an ATOM feed format. I’ve been a big fan of REST integration with SharePoint for some time now and earlier this year and late last tried to convince our clients that consuming REST services within SharePoint could expand their platform functionality. Now with native REST support in SharePoint the integration possibilities are just mind blowing. SharePoint could effectively serve as a content engine for large enterprises and asides to exposing data through the normal web interface could also present data to mobile and custom applications.

The final discussion was about the LINQ to SharePoint Provider that is new for 2010. I love the idea of being able to use LINQ instead of CAML with SharePoint 2010. CAML is fine if you know what you’re doing but doesn’t exactly have a big fan base ;-)  As part of the demo we got to see auto generated code for a web using SPMetal. This generates some LINQ code that represents the SP objects that were present at the URI that was passed. Like the previous demos they worked against the same data but this time everything ran server side and was based on server controls.  

LINQ, REST and the Client OM for SharePoint are nothing short of a revolution for developers and customers alike. Which technology to use is dependent on the task at hand. A decision matrix is available as part the presentation and can be downloaded from the SPC site.

______________________________________________________
ProActive A/S

microsoft partner of the year, information worker, 2008  

Victor Keegan
Strategic Architect