Microsoft SharePoint & Developers Conferences Wrap-Up - Part 2

16
Dec
2009

Fred Yeomans

Continuing on from my last column (part 1), here are some more notes on SPC09…

Business Intelligence

PerformancePoint has been absorbed into SharePoint Server. PerformancePoint Services are included in the SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise license. There is also a significant update to the presentation graphics within PerformancePoint, including use of Silverlight, 3D graphics, and time-lapse charts.

Another big announcement was for PowerPivot (formerly project Gemini). The PowerPivot addin for Excel allows Excel to use the Analysis Services engine in memory, allowing Excel to work on very large datasets (millions of cells) very rapidly.

You can also combine Excel web access web parts and Reporting Services side by side. Also, the Reporting Services web part, reducing the page refreshes involved when manipulating or drilling into reports.

Business Connectivity Services

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is Business Data Catalog (BDC) all grown up. As I stated in a previous column, while BDC was a great idea, it was limited in practice by the complexity of setting it up, defining entities, etc. (much of which was done via hand coding of XML files) and the lack of tool support.

BCS solves many of these issues. Much of the work to define basic BCS tasks can be done through the newly redesigned SharePoint Designer. This includes defining a new External Content Type (formerly and entity) along with its data source and operations (which now include full CRUD capabilities, not just read) for standard SQL or WCF data interfaces. You can also access anything which can be reached in .NET code by writing a .NET assembly and then referencing that from within SharePoint Designer.

This external content type can then be used as the basis for lists within SharePoint, and can be pulled down to the local client into SharePoint Workspaces. 

Another neat feature in BCS is the ability to map a BCS External Content Type into an Office type (appointment, contact, task, etc.). For example, you can define an External Content Type that maps into an office Contact type. You map the fields from your external data source into the fields of a Contact, and can add “extension fields” to the Contact for fields which do not exist in an Office Contact. The really cool part is that you can then surface this information in an Office client application like Outlook, where it looks like any other Contact. You can even update the contact information in Outlook, and the BCS infrastructure will propagate the changes back to the original data store.

I really like the new BCS stuff!

Workflow

Workflow is another area in which Microsoft has invested heavily in SharePoint 2010. There has been much focus on the tools for Workflow definition. My only complaint would be that it is not going to use Workflow Foundation 4.0. I understand why from a program management and timing perspective it was impossible to use .NET 4.0 in SharePoint 2010 it is still disappointing from a selfish point of view.

In MOSS 2007 you could build workflows for SharePoint in either SharePoint Designer 2007, or in Visual Studio. In reality, anything but the most basic workflows required Visual Studio and custom code. In addition, if you did define your workflow in SharePoint Designer, then it was permanently connected to the list on which you designed. There was no practical way to move that workflow to another list or site. So, if you wanted to apply the same SharePoint Designer Workflow to multiple lists, possibly on multiple sites, you had to recreate it for every list. Not very practical.

In SharePoint 2010, you can use SharePoint Designer to build much more complex workflows. In addition, these workflows can be packaged up and deployed on your SharePoint Server as a Feature, and then be attached to any list you want. You can even define workflows which are not attached o any list, called Site Workflows. These are launched from the Site Actions menu, and are general purpose workflows not related to a specific list item.

But wait, it gets even better. You can create a workflow in SharePoint Designer, and export it to Visio. You can then design the actual workflow in Visio in a more “user friendly” view, and export it back to SharePoint Designer to be packaged up and deployed. Another neat feature is that when the workflow is deployed, you can have the status of running workflow instances displayed graphically using the Visio diagram. I am not immediately sure how useful it is, but it is pretty.

There is also a specific workflow activity within SharePoint Designer (called and Office Task) which facilitates the creation of tasks with a deadline, and also define reminder and escalation behaviours, and task completion behaviour.

Finally, if you get to a point where you have defined your workflow in SharePoint Designer and find you need to do something which Designer does not support, you have a couple of options. If it is functionality which can be encapsulate in a workflow activity, and then you can code that activity in Visual Studio, and import the assembly into Designer where you can use it in your workflow just like any built in activity. Alternatively, if you need to do something which cannot be encapsulated in an activity, the workflow can be exported to Visual Studio and extended as desired.

Search

Search has also been a major focus in SharePoint 2010. There are two levels of search available. The built in “basic” search is an upgraded version of the MOSS 2007 search capability. In addition you can now purchase FAST Search, acquired by Microsoft. FAST Search is a much more powerful implementation, allowing you to index all the information, find patterns in the data, and create refining criteria.  FAST search automatically creates the refining criteria for your search, and lets the user further refine based on those relevant categories.

There is also a great improvement in the scalability of the search platform, allowing an order of magnitude larger set of documents to be indexed.

Office Services

SharePoint Server 2010 has been re-architected away from Share Services Providers to a pluggable Services Application Topology. Among the Services included in SharePoint 2010 are various Office Services. This includes Excel Services as in MOSS 2007. In addition, we now have PowerPoint, Word, and Visio services. In Word Services, for example, you have server-side access to Word and the Open XML APIs, allowing you to do document generation, conversion and printing on the server. Visio Services allows you to deploy and display Visio diagrams on a SharePoint site. The Visio web part uses a Silverlight-based rendering engine to render the Visio diagram, making it dynamic and interactive. You can zoom in on the diagram and interact with the diagram. In addition, if the diagram is based on “live data”, that behaviour is also active within SharePoint.

Social Computing

Microsoft has added significant Social Networking functionality to SharePoint 2010. This includes a greatly enhance MySite, with personal and network information. It attempts to help you identify your “network” according to skills, interests, and activities.

This is also a new content tagging, rating and annotation capability.

Continued… Next time PDC09