I had the good fortune of attending seven sessions at the SharePoint Saturday in Redmond. The presentations were first class. The conference, breakfast, lunch, and coffee were free. And the crowd was enthusiastic. I took detailed notes on three sessions that I know many of you will be interested in. Here’s the first of a three-part series on SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint Saturday in Redmond.
SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: Part I - SharePoint 2010 overview
Gideon Bibliowicz, a SharePoint Product Manager from Microsoft, kicked off the day with an overview of SharePoint 2010. Although I‘ve read a few overview presentations and scoured some marketing sites, I liked the way Gideon positioned SharePoint 2010 and went beyond the usual fluffy hype with some fun demos.
Almost everyone has a hard time defining SharePoint when their neighbor asks "What is SharePoint?" Why is it so hard to pin it down in 25 words or less? Here’s a good stab at it:
"SharePoint is a business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web."
Gideon elaborated some key words. "Collaboration" can occur between 2 or 100,000 people. "Platform" means that there is a complete and entire ecosystem around which SharePoint can be used, extended, partnered with, and customized. "Web" means, it’s not just for the intranet anymore, it’s also an internet, public-facing development platform (See for example
www.ferrari.com).
I’m going to expand this definition a bit, and give you my take in exactly 25 words:
SharePoint 2010 is a collaboration platform for organizations (business, education, or government) on the web (intranet, extranet, and internet) that integrates beautifully with Office 2010.
No pie in the sky
Gideon then dug deeper using the new SharePoint pie (or donut, or wheel, or starfish) as the visual prop.
These are the three key messages:
Connect and empower people is the who, and encompasses online and offline Office, as well as external data from Line-of-Business (LOB) applications.
Cut costs with a unified infrastructure is the how, and focuses on IT maintenance and control.
Rapidly respond to business needs is the why, and focuses on improved ease of use for everyone as well as the new composites realm which are the means to the end. (See Demo 4: Composites below)
Of course, there is a bit of a delicate balancing act between the how and the why. IT needs to exert consistency and control within the enterprise, but you as an Information Worker (IW) want to get beyond the "Submit requests to IT and wait syndrome" and get your job done. You both want to do it in a reasonably harmonious fashion. That’s where the concept of SharePoint governance comes in.
In the SharePoint pie, each of the six SharePoint components is expressed in a wheel to show the deep integration of each. They are no longer loosely compiled pillars that sort of work together.
Content: 90% of this is your lists, libraries, pages, and metadata. This is your bedrock or foundation. Lots of ease-of-use improvements here.
Search: This is self-explanatory, but there are lots of enhancements here that empower you (See Demo 2: Find expertise below).
Sites: This used to be called portals, but that word is passé and too limiting. We are now talking sites on the web – inside and outside the firewall.
Communities: There are a lot of new investments in this hot area of idea-generation, Web interactions, social awareness, and people collaboration.
Insights: This is really another way of saying Business Intelligence (BI), but the idea is to emphasize that this is BI for the masses (The middle tier of the BI Big Stack).
Composites: Create powerful solutions without code by using Web Parts, external LOB data, Visio Services (new), Access Services (new), and Excel Services (improved), InfoPath (improved), and SharePoint Designer (revamped). You could say Microsoft Mashups.
For the rest of the hour, Gideon demo-ed some important feature and solution highlights that illustrated these six "value propositions."
Demo 1: Update a web page just like that
The key point of this demo is how incredibly easy it is now to update a web page. You simply edit the page and your changes are published with one click. The UI is simple and intuitive, but has rich controls. The new ribbon interface makes it so easy to discover and find commands. It's much easier to add Web Parts, images, videos, and even Silverlight apps. It's nothing to add your own theme, either built-in to SharePoint or one you might customize in PowerPoint.
A true crowd pleaser is that all of these new features are browser-agnostic, and work in IE, Firefox, and Safari. In fact when Gideon does this demo, he is working in Safari from the get go, and then usually an astute customer points it out.
Gideon related a story where a cruise ship line wanted to quickly update their Web site to ease passenger concerns about the swine-flu virus on board their ship. It was easy for the captain to do this because the cruise-line was using SharePoint 2010.
Demo 2: Find expertise, not just people
Search is new and improved (Really!) with better algorithms, Best Bets, and refinement panels for easier filtering and sorting. More importantly, search is organic. It’s empowered by ratings, tagging, metadata, keywords, taxonomies, folksonomies, all of which when used by an organization make search much more relevant for your company.
Also, when you click a link to a document, it can open up in Office Web Apps (and not the client) so you can quickly see the contents or find a slide to a presentation in great fidelity on a Web page.
User profiles and organizational browsing are rich and integrated with Search so that if you, for example, type the word “gears” in the mythical company of Contoso, you quickly find who knows all the ins and outs about gears, where in the organization they sit, and who their manager is. You can even add a note to someone’s Noteboard (a new feature) to say you would like to meet with them when they get back from their business trip, let’s say.
Tag clouds help you find out who the most knowledgeable folks are and what level of expertise they have. Employees can create rich and deep profiles of information that are used by Search to analyze and surface the right content and people you are looking for.
"Metadata for the masses" is another important 2010 feature. You can quickly create, update, and evolve taxonomies and folksonomies that are relevant for your organization and use these terms in search, in view columns, and in large content sets (more on that in Part III of this blog series).
Demo 3: Visualize insights
A key addition to SharePoint 2010 has been a big chunk of PerformancePoint features and functionality, including an advanced dashboard designer, Web Parts, scorecards, KPIs, data source connections, data visualizations like the decomposition tree (a sort-of visual PivotTable), and well-organized business intelligence centers.
Combine this with Excel’s new slicers (think flexible, re-arrangeable filters), Sparklines, and the PowerPivot add-in (analyze 100 million records in the blink of an eye – I kid you not!), and you have all the tools you need to create and use BI in your team or group without a PhD in Computer Science.
Did I mention that the new Chart Web Part incorporates the acclaimed Dundas visualization technologies?
DEMO 4: Compose a business solution with Composites
How hard is it to incorporate LOB data from SAP, SIEBEL, or SQL Server into SharePoint and leverage that data in a quick business solution? This time around, it's not hard at all. You now have bi-directional, read/write access to LOB external data. Gideon used the thoroughly revamped SharePoint Designer (more on that in Part II of this series) created an entity, which is essentially a data connection, an external content type, which is a set of columns from a table or query as well as a filter, and a mapping of fields between the LOB database and this newly-created external list. It was all done with easy-to-understand web pages, dialog boxes, and data designer tools.
As mentioned, the end result is an external list that looks and acts suspiciously like a native list in SharePoint. To prove the point, Gideon updated a list field, and showed the change in a SQL Server database query. Then he showed how easy it was to incorporate this data into an Outlook contact, or Word document using fields.
All of this was done without using a single line of code. All of a sudden, external data from legacy and LOB systems can be deeply integrated into SharePoint, whether or not you are a developer.
Wrap up
Gideon finished with a 10-minute video from some big customers, Sony, Chevron, and Del Monte, who all have been using SharePoint 2010 to make their companies more productive. The key message delivered was: how easy it is to develop solutions, and how much time was saved in creating those solutions.
When the usually-down-to-earth Steve Ballmer recently delivered the keynote at the SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, he said, and I quote: "SharePoint is a magical product." Now I hope you see why he said that.
There’s a lot more to SharePoint 2010. Watch for: SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: Part II - SharePoint Designer 2010 Overview and SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: Part III – Enterprise Content Management Overview of this three-part series on this blog in future posts.
Tell us what you think.
Mark Gillis