Today I attended the SharePoint Roadshow in Chicago. It was a great event featuring a slew of MVPs showcasing SharePoint 2010.
Here are some tidbits I learned, as well as what I consider the highlights of each session:
“Enterprise Content Management”
Chris Johnson – Technical Project Manager for SharePoint
- Silverlight videos are supported in both field controls and web parts
- New localization features to complement variations: “Multilingual UI” (MUI)
- Users can manually select their language/culture or have it auto-detected through headers
- Seamless switching between installed language packs
- Content deployment vastly improved
- Now supports Point-in-Time snapshots
- Generally, concurrency and consistency are improved
- Certain features are only available with SQL Server Enterprise
- Usage analytics can be easily exported to Excel
- Page libraries now support folders
- Host header site collections are now officially supported via Central Admin
- Versioning still takes complete snapshots, not deltas
“SharePoint Designer 2010 and Workflows”
Asif Rehmani – SharePoint Trainer, MOSS MVP
- Workflows can now target lists, content types, and sites
- SPD 2010 not backwards compatible with Sharepoint 2007
- SPD 2010 can no longer edit non-SharePoint sites via FrontPage extensions / FTP
- SPD 2010 can be turned off by Site Collection Admins per site through Central Admin
- Additionally, can prevent users from customizing / unghosting
- All dialogs are now flat; no more modals
- Type-ahead action completion
- Still cannot query other sites from within SPD workflows
- SPD Workflows now support “Parallel Blocks”
- SPD Workflows can be saved without publishing (YES!)
- SPD Workflows can be packaged directly to WSPs
- Workflows can be exported to and imported from Visio
- Site workflows (as opposed to list/content type) must manually be kicked off?
“Developing SharePoint 2010 Workflows with Visual Studio”
Robert Bogue – Solutions Architect, Author, MOSS MVP
- Rob Bogue states that all of the InfoPath issues he griped about in “Dear Mr. InfoPath” have been corrected
- Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 can be installed side-by-side
- The “Site Directory” template no longer exists
- Versioning is still manual
- WCF workflow listeners should work, but nobody could confirm
- SharePoint 2010 code will mostly be valid XHTML, but they aren’t aiming for full XHTML compliance
“SharePoint 2010 Administration with PowerShell”
Darrin Bishop – SharePoint Architect, WSS MVP
- STSADM will still be supported, but no commands have been added
- Sites and webs accessed through PowerShell need to be disposed as in managed code
- Two commands to memorize:
- Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell
- Get-Command -module Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
- Commands only support farm, web application, site collections, and webs; no lists
“Administration through SharePoint 2010 Central Admin”
Bob Fox – SharePoint Administrator, MOSS MVP
Kris Wagner – SharePoint Architect
- The term “Index” is universally replaced with “Crawl”
- “WFE” terminology goes away
- Duplicate service applications run in round-robin configuration
- Farm Administrators must explicitly be added to a Site Collection to view it
- Automatic repair tools are modeled after SCOM
- Support will exist for automatic definition downloads and updates
- One screen shows all assemblies and patch levels
- When all service applications are deployed, there are 17 databases
- The “Collaboration Site” template is retired
“Inside SharePoint 2010 Data Access”
Paul Schaeflin – SharePoint Architect, MOSS MVP
- CAML now supports JOINs
- Lists support uniqueness constraints, which create SQL indexes
- List queries are throttled at 5,000 items / view for normal users; 20,000 items / view for administrators
- When working with lists, “related list” connected web parts can be added
- Full REST read and write access through /_vti_bin/ListData.svc
- Data is served through Atom, with all fields served through the Contentm:Propertiesd nodes
“Business Connectivity Services”
Chris Johnson – Technical Project Manager for SharePoint
- BCS is natively baked into SharePoint Foundation
- BCS client data is stored in SQL Compact Edition databases
- External content types are accessible in Office clients
- There’s no intermediate caching from Line-of-Business systems
- All list forms can be “upsized” to customizable InfoPath versions
- External content types aren’t compatible with KPIs
- When a user clicks “Connect to Outlook”, a custom VSTO add-in is provisioned
- Visual Studio supports tokens for 4-part strong names
- Average BCS queries only add ~10 milliseconds of latentcy
- Web parts can be added anywhere within a wiki zone
It was a fantastic event all-around. Thanks to everyone involved!