From Cornelius, great summary - SharePoint Conference 2006 - Day 1

SharePoint Conference 2006 - Day 1

So, Day 1 draws to a close.� Having played with SharePoint vNext since DF4, I knew a lot of things that were coming, but it's always nice to see them in action.� With time being such a limiting factor, it's hard to get around to testing everything.�

I've been pretty tight lipped on vNext until now, but with the NDA out of the way, the time has finally come to express my views openly.� Given my experimentation in the past and my attendance of sessions on Day 1, here's what I picked up that impressed me most.� Bear in mind that this is only based on content I saw on Day 1.� Other content is coming later this week so this is not intended to be a top anything list.� I'm also dumping my thoughts sequentially for each session so again... no ranking involved here.

1. I had already blogged earlier today my opinion that Microsoft is positioning SharePoint as the defacto development base/platform for all business application development.� It is significant to note the size of Microsoft's investment in SharePoint.� I would say they pretty much are betting the farm here, similar to how they bet the farm on Windows back in 1995.� Given their track record, I would not be hedging any bets against SharePoint!


2. Again, one of those things you knew was coming, but the ability to take WSS site content offline, that's right, I said OFFLINE, using Outlook 2007 (without the need for Groove) is HUGE!� I am more sensitive to the topic given my environment, but this is a very big need and the fact that it can be filled out of the box without having to license any third party (or recently acquired Microsoft)�software is great news.


3. I like the way that kicking off a Windows Workflow Foundation action anywhere in SharePoint will automatically add the given workflow to your Outlook Tasks list.


4. Of course everyone knows that everything in SharePoint is RSS enabled... all lists, all libraries etc.� Combine that with the fact that Outlook will support RSS feeds out of the box and you have yet another win.� Alerts are still there, but RSS feeds are much better because you can even customize the field and properties of the list/library that you wish to have included in the RSS feed.


5. The improvements to the My Site now makes it a viable option for users to really use as their start page.� The aggregation of site memberships and task lists to the My Site will definitely help drive adoption.


6. I like the meta data pane in all the Office applications.� Now we might finally get users to update meta data.� If you want them to update it, it must be easy to access and with the meta data pane, it now is.


7. I absolutely LOVE staged deployment with deployment paths and jobs.� This is going to make staging so much easier.


8. MOSS is supposed to ship with SAP and Siebel data connectors.� I'm sure there will be others, but nobody has mentioned any others yet, so we can only assume these two for now.� Of course there will be Dynamics connectors which basically includes everything Microsoft has from Great Plains to CRM etc.


9. A feature called "Links just work" is really nice.� Picture being outside your corporate firewall and accessing your email via OWA.� You get a link to a SharePoint site and click on it but it fails to render because it's behind the firewall.� Now with OWA, you'll be able to tunnel through to SharePoint sites as OWA uses your credentials for SharePoint access.


10. Managed folders in Outlook are positioned to replace PST's.� This is good news for corporate compliance and liability because even though you may be enforcing automated destruction of email via Exchange, users would copy their messages to PST's where they could remain forever causing potential liability issues.� The managed folders gives users the ability to classify their content and through the use of WSS libraries for archived storage and the OWA tunneling described in 9 above, it will give users access to their messages from anywhere they have a browser and an internet connection.� No more having to cart the laptop with you just to get to your email in the PST.


11. SharePoint Search now has explicit AND as apposed to explicit OR.� So what does that mean?� Well, remember how you would enter John Doe into the search box instead of "John Doe" and you'd get documents that contained either John or Doe instead of John and Doe?� No more.� The explicit AND solves that.


12. You can now also use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs with your search query so you could do something like John Doe -"Jane Doe" to get documents containing John Doe but not Jane Doe.


13. Spelling correction.� So everyone loves when you type your search into Google and you miss spell a word and it asks you if you meant the corrected spelling right?� SharePoint now features the same thing.


14. Duplicate elimination.� Not quite sure how this works just yet, but basically, search will eliminate duplicate documents from your results set.� You have an option to view all the duplicates, but basically, you only see one link to a given documents instead of potentially dozens.


15. People search is great especially the fact that it will index any LDAP 3 directory.� That's right, you heard me... ANY LDAP 3 directory.


16. Lotus Notes can be indexed as a content source.� I know this is old news, but it is so important to me that I needed to list it again.


17. No more different type of searches for MOSS and WSS sites.� If you have MOSS, you can select to have the WSS sites simply subscribe to the MOSS search services.� No more user confusion.� No more multiple steps to get to the search page.


18. Security freaks will love this one... the index account no longer need full read/write permissions to the content that it is indexing.� As long as the account has full read rights, indexing will work.� Sleep easy oh security admins!


19. Search logging & analysis helps you figure out what it is your users are looking for and keeping track of click troughs allows you to figure out what it is they associate as the content they were looking for.� This will help find tune search relevancy and best bets over time as the system can "learn" and adapt to user behavior.


20. Continuous propagation allows for content to be indexed and the indexed items to be available for searching long before the indexing of a massive content source has been completed.� Think shared drives with tons of data.


21. Change log crawls for SharePoint content will allow the indexing service to know when something has changed and to only index it at that point of change.� This makes for massively improved indexing performance.

No numbers were officially given, but it was said that a single indexer would be able to support 10's of millions of documents.� Official numbers is expected later this month.

We'll see what tomorrow brings!

Later
C