In my previous post on the O2007 Dev Con recap, I mentioned a host of new features that the Sharepoint Point team has built into the new Office Sharepoint Server and WSS v3. Here are some more details based on notes that I wrote down at Dev Con, so please keep in mind that this is my understanding of the sessions @dev con and is based on beta software and documentation…
List Infrastructure
We can now create folders within Lists. Folders behave as individual items as far as security is concerned. Which means that we can control the security on these folders.
Fields can now have multi-value lookups. We can also create field types by extending the out of the box field types. These can be defined in fldtypes*.xml. We can also create UI elements which will be rendered to collect the values for these new properties.
Note: Blogs are SPWeb objects, Posts and Comments are SPList objects and Pictures are SPList item objects.
We can also associate a list with an email account. I.e. all emails sent to that email address will end up in a list on the sharepoint site. Another new feature is to be able to get a list of items within a list as an RSS 2.0 Feed.
Security
We have cascading security i.e. By applying a policy at a site level, we can override security settings of contained lists, libraries etc. We also have item level security, which is great because now we can do things with libraries for which we needed hacks. E.g. We can have a Forms library where once people submit forms, they can view only their forms and not other’s. OR view only the documents they have uploaded or say in a workflow, only items for which they are the next participant. In v2.0 we could always have created a view but security through obscurity is no good.
We can also use ASP.NET providers for providing security to the site.
Auditing
We can now turn on auditing for lists and libraries. This is also granular, which means that we can turn on auditing for specific operations such as Uodates, Inserts etc. Please note that there is also a concept of ‘Change Log’ which is similar to auditing but not the same. It is a sequential list of changes to items. This is always ‘ON’ and the related classes are SPChangeCollection and SPChangeToken.
Versioning / Source control
It was mentioned that there is stricter enforcement of document checkin/checkout. Any documents which do not have all their *required* properties filled out cannot be checked in. Any uploaded documents with missing properties will automatically be in the checked out state till all the properties are completed. We also have major and minor versioning. Minor versions are basically draft copies which are only viewable to the person who has them checked out and cannot be viewed by others. Only the major versions are published and made available to all.
We also have versioning for list items, can view version differences and can also do version trimming i.e. only keep last "n" number of versions.
The next post will cover some more topics…
