Ferrara Data Consulting | Company Blog

The last couple of months have been chock full of conferences, SharePints, streaming media events, SharePoint 2010 teasers, and of course the massive preparations for fantasy football! The icing on the cake for me was the recently-ended Best Practices Conference 2009 (BPC) in Washington, DC. As SharePoint 2010 creeps closer towards public disclosure, this was the last conference before the proverbial SharePoint mecca, SharePoint Conference 2009 in Vegas (SPC09). Although the BPC is not new, it was certainly a different experience for all who attended, especially those who were not able to make it.

If you haven’t been following the #bpc09 hashtag on twitter (or have no idea what a twitter hashtag is), then you may not have known that the entire conference was covered live by several of us who were able to attend. Mark Miller, founder and editor of EndUserSharePoint.com, and Bamboo Nation organized a live media platform that allowed volunteers to live blog the sessions and various conference events. If you’ve ever been to a SharePoint conference, then you know how difficult it is to keep up on everything going on. Our community is fortunate to have some of the greatest speakers around, and this frequently makes it difficult to choose between competing sessions. The live blogging platform allows you to catch up on anything you’ve missed as it is instantly archived. With multiple feeds active, following specific tracks was effortless. Many thanks to Mark Miller and the volunteers who made it happen! The archives are now online for your perusal. And you can also check out my flickr feed and youtube videos that include live SharePoint 2010 demo images and a must-see video of Dux Raymond Sy performing SharePoint is Nice, Nice Baby.

For me, this conference represented a paradigm shift in the way content and ideas were shared and delivered at a technical event. And I think that conference organizers need to pay close attention to how these things are evolving. Although there is no substitution for the experience of being at the conference and networking with great people, many of us do not have the time or money to indulge ourselves fully. Some of my colleagues and I agree that there is a legitimate market for live streaming passes for these conferences. With an “a la carte pass” available, virtual conference attendees could pick and choose the sessions that they’d like to see and pay a reduced price for their consumption. These sessions could also be resold after the event in an on-demand fashion. And although there are providers out there like DevConnections.com, who offer single session videos; they are not the live sessions from the actual conference. The trade-off is studio-recorded quality for real-world participatory learning.

During the BPC, Mark Miller was able to live stream several sessions including Todd Bleeker’s popular and intense session on SharePoint web part development. With many viewers watching from their office or home, it was very easy to see the value in doing this globally. Even though it was streamed for free, courtesy of Mark, many would have gladly paid a minimal fee for the content if that was the only option. In my opinion, the bar is being raised for SharePoint session quality, and why should it only be enjoyed by the 40-50 people who were able to see it live?

In conclusion, BPC09 was a great success for the SharePoint community and was a nice warm up for SPC09 in October. I met so many awesome people for the first time that there are too many to list! Fortunately some of my colleagues have authored their own recap posts outlining their experiences at the conference.

Check them out!

Paul Culmsee – BPC 09 August Wrap-up

Ruven Gotz – Why are SharePoint conferences so much fun? (My Best Practices ’09 recap)

John Anderson – Celebrating the Marriage of Knowledge and Creativity at the Best Practices Conference

Lori Gowin – Best Practices Conference – Recap

Early this week at TechEd in LA, Microsoft formally announced and confirmed some of the rumors pertaining to the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. The product is slated for a H1 2010 release, and these new details are sure to increase the hype surrounding SharePoint 2010.

The compiled list below is in addition to the already confirmed features listed in this post.

• SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008/2005
• SharePoint Server 2010 will not support IE6 at all
• The UI will include the popular Office ribbon
• Visual Studio 2010 will allow developers to build and deploy SharePoint web parts and products natively with new tools and templates
• Visual Studio 2010 will also be able to finally browse SharePoint sites and objects
• Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – A new specification that was jointly created by Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Oracle and others with the purpose of exchanging content with and between ECM systems. This specification will be utilized in some capacity with SharePoint Server 2010

This latest batch of news should cause all organizations to immediately plan for the new set of hardware requirements if SharePoint Server 2010 is on their product roadmap.

Read the official Microsoft announcement about system requirements here.

Stay tuned for additional information on SharePoint 2010.

Since the announcing of SharePoint 2010 this month, the community has been buzzing with what we know about ‘10 and what we are still speculating about ‘10. There isn’t a whole lot of concrete information out there yet, but I’ve compiled a list below of what I’ve seen so far. I’ve also started listing some of the pressing things that we, the SharePoint community, would like to see in ‘10.

Confirmed:

• So long MOSS! It seems like you’ve been renamed to just Microsoft SharePoint Server. We’ve called you so many things over the years that we’re hoping this name will actually stick.
• PerformancePoint Monitoring & Analytics functions will be bundled into the Server license
• Users will be able to open/edit/save/collaborate on Office documents through a web browser
• Native support for ODF and PDF seems to be a safe confirmation as Office System SP2 will now support editing of both formats.
• All Forms Server functions bundled with 2010 – There are clients who signed on for Forms Server standalone for WSS installs, so it would be nice if they bundled it with the next equivalent of WSS. I have an unofficial confirm from an MS employee that features will be available in 2010 but no solid details so far.
• Standardized UI across all Office products, browsers, mobile devices
• Open API support
• FAST Search for Server Enterprise owners
• Upgrades to 2010 will rely heavily on the new upgrade scanning command in STSADM – available in SharePoint 2007 SP2
• 2010 Q1 or Q2 projected release date

Hopes/Wants:

• Native SQL tables for SharePoint lists – Ever since this interview with Bill Gates, I’ve hoped that this will actually come to fruition. But as with any Microsoft product, it can take 2-3 iterations to get a major feature like this once it’s mentioned.
• More out-of-the-box branding features
• Native Silverlight and AJAX support
• More advanced backup options
• Thanks for making SPD free, but we need it to be more useful and less frustrating!
• jQuery support

You can also visit SharePoint Buzz for their list of SharePoint 2010 features.

Please post anything that I’ve missed or something that you’d like to see in 2010.

5/12/09 UPDATE- New post here with more SharePoint 2010 details.

With the much-anticipated release of Office System 2007 SP2, we now have just about all of the details of what will be included in the release. You can read the full post here.

Here are some of the more notable updates/fixes:

• Office will now edit and save in PDF format without any additional add-ins. You’ll still need Adobe Reader to read the files.
• Office will now edit, save and open the OpenDocument formats (.odt, .ods, .odp). We should also have the option to save to ODF files by default instead of MS Office formats.
• Supports Vista SP2, Server 2008 SP2, Server 2003 R2, Windows 7, and IE8
• STSADM command added to check to see if the farm can be upgraded
• Offers better support for Firefox, which will hopefully address formatting issues when viewing SharePoint sites through other browsers.
• Better rendering for Excel Services in all browsers including Firefox and easier to configure web parts
• Decreased page load times for forms running on Forms Server
• More informative and user-friendly KB article that also brings back the availability of the spreadsheet changelog that details all fixes included

Check back at the link above on the 28th to get the full scoop of what’s been included in Office System SP2.

In January Microsoft announced that PerformancePoint Server 2007 would be bundled in SharePoint 14, the much-anticipated next release of SharePoint. They have plans of releasing SP3 for PerformancePoint in mid-2009, but this will be the last major software update for PerformancePoint as a standalone product.

PerformancePoint is Microsoft’s BI platform that is built on the familiar SharePoint framework. It’s basically a customized version of SharePoint that is tailored for customers who need more advanced BI solutions for their organization. PPS generally has two major functions, Monitoring & Analytics and Planning. The M&A piece allows us to create dashboards with any number of analytics for scorecards and charts. The Planning portion is related to budgeting and financial forecasting. The main problem with this product is that it isn’t utilized by that many companies with MOSS 2007 licenses. The added expense for another server product is not practical for most organizations in this economic climate. To make matters worse, MOSS 2007 has a very basic set of BI tools builtin that often makes it hard to upsell on the more useful tools since they are a standalone product.

Microsoft has realized this shortcoming and has decided to combine both products in the next iteration of SharePoint. Unfortunately, this has led to the axing of the integration of the Planning portion of PPS into MOSS. You can still get support from Microsoft on this if you already have PPS standalone, but it will not be integrated into SharePoint 14.

The Bottomline:

This is a logical step for Microsoft’s BI group as PPS and MOSS seemed to have similar goals with competing platforms. If all goes as announced, the next version of MOSS will have even greater BI capabilities right out of the box. More mid-sized companies will be exposed to these useful features, and it will further enhance the value of MOSS. The only downside to this is that the planning portion of PPS will not be integrated. It is unknown if Microsoft will revisit Planning for MOSS, but for now you’ll need to stick with PPS for those requirements.

Ferrara Data Consulting’s new web identity is nearly complete! The site design is undergoing some final tweaks and will be unleashed soon.

All Sharepoint and development content will be migrated here, so check back periodically for updates.

In the meantime check out a new favorite Sharepoint blog of mine, Sharepoint Magazine.

Today we’ve joined forces with Bamboo Solutions to better provide custom Sharepoint web parts and solution accelerators to our clients. If you haven’t heard of Bamboo Solutions, then head over to their site to learn about their large product offering for Sharepoint. We are currently offering free support on all Bamboo products purchased through us! Contact us today for a free quote on custom WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 implementations, now featuring Bamboo Solutions addons.