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Fall Conference Wrap-Up – Part 4

Fred YeomansAs promised, here is the 4th part of my fall conference wrap-up. In this part I will take what I talked about in the previous 3 parts, and try to relate it to real world solutions.

Usability & Manageability
Obviously the changes to the UI in SharePoint 2010 are significant, and are the most noticeable change your users will see immediately. This should hopefully lead to better adoption by your users, and better productivity.

On the manageability side, the user interface for central administration is greatly improved. In addition, there have the following should all improve manageability and reduce support costs:

  • Management through Windows PowerShell rather than STSADM;
  • Improved backup/restore with greater control and granularity;
  • Patch/upgrade management;
  • Built in health and best practice monitoring.

Records Management
Improvements in the Records Management capabilities of SharePoint have obvious benefits, including the potential reduction in reliance upon other third products to “fill the gaps.” Fewer products to support generally leads to cost savings, both in licensing and in support. In addition, having records management capabilities intrinsic to SharePoint allows records management processes to be better integrated with other document creation and collaboration processes.

In-place records management in SharePoint 2010 could also lead to greater productivity, due to RM activities being less disruptive to the flow of work. 

Workflow
While the fundamental workflow technology remains the same (it is still based on Workflow Foundation in .NET 3.5), there are significant improvements to workflow in SharePoint 2010.

One of the major challenges with workflow implementation is that the tools have generally been developer centric. While various products have claimed to be accessible to non-developers (i.e. business analysts and process owners), it has always been the case that you always hit a wall with these tools, and development of most real-world workflows still requires development resources.

In SharePoint, there have been three ways to create Workflows – SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, or a third-party toolkit. In MOSS 2007, you could only define very basic workflows in SharePoint Designer, and they were attached to a specific list. For the most part, real-world workflow solutions required Visual Studio development, or the use of a third-party product.

In the SharePoint 2010 world, SharePoint Designer has been vastly improved. This means that a larger portion of your workflow solutions can be developed by business analysts and process owners using SharePoint Designer (and even Visio). There will still be things for which you will need to resort to “real” development, but the amount of workflow development, maintenance, and support you can take out of development’s hands has vastly increased.

What all of this means to your firm is that you can do more workflow, you can do more of it yourself, and you can do more of it without developers (note I said “more of it”, not all of it!)

Data Integration
As I described in my previous columns, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is an area of great improvement in SharePoint 2010. The tools for creating connections to your backend line-of-business (LOB) systems are vastly improved. Much of the work can now be done in SharePoint Designer. In addition, the connection is bidirectional – not only can you import data via BCS, you can modify it and have it pushed back to the LOB system if you want.

Another great feature here is the ability to map imported data to Office “types”. For example, contacts imported from a CRM or other system can be mapped to an Office Contact type. This can then be surfaced to Outlook, where the imported contacts will be displayed in a manner consistent with “native” Outlook contacts.

In addition, all of the information you bring into SharePoint 2010 via BCS can be made available to other Office applications, such as Word, allowing you to create solutions which make users more productive by making information from LOB systems available from within the desktop applications they use the most.

As a simple example of how this might be used in the real world, let’s consider the synchronization of calendar events in a docketing system with users’ calendars in Outlook. Using BCS in SharePoint Designer, the calendar events from the docketing system could be brought into SharePoint 2010. Since these are clearly calendar events, they would be mapped into the Office Appointment type. Once the External Content Type is defined, a list in SharePoint 2010 could be created which contains the imported data. Now that the data is available in SharePoint, a click of the button creates an install package for Outlook which will make the Appointments available within Outlook. From here, further BCS connections could be used to make available to the user (within Outlook) information related to the appointment, including for example client/matter information extracted from the practice management system.

The BCS improvements over BDC are significant. It remains to be seen whether the functionality has come far enough to eliminate the need for third-party data integration products.

Document Generation
As noted previously, SharePoint 2010 includes a server-side implementation of Word called (appropriately) Word Services. In the past, the only way to automate the production of Word documents required use of COM automation interfaces – even if you generate the documents using XML, you still have to use the Word application to do the actual layout, to print, or to save as a “.doc” file. Microsoft has always been adamant the using Word in this way in a server application is completely unsupported, and impossible on a large scale. Of course, in a past existence I made a fairly good living producing software which generated large numbers of documents for a large number of customers in just this way.

In the world of SharePoint and Office 2010, however, there is now a better way. Word Services run within the context of the new Service Application Topology of SharePoint 2010. This infrastructure provides Word Services with the features one expects of a robust, highly available, scalable platform, including load balancing and automatic redundancy. Word Services provides the capability to render Word documents on the server, and then save them in almost any format supported by Word 2010 (including PDF). Word Services also allows server-side printing, and manages the interface to the corporate printing infrastructure. By combining this with the Open XML SDK on the server, documents can be generated, saved, and printed all as a part of a service application, or as part of a Workflow running on the SharePoint Server.

As an example, perhaps you have a workflow running or your server (purchasing, cheque requests, new matter intake, etc.) where the user interface for the workflow uses InfoPath or Forms Services. At the end of the workflow, it is almost always required to have a document produced as a record of the workflow steps, approvals, and outcome. Using the Open XML SDK along with Word Services, the data from the form can easily be injected into a Word template, and the resultant document saved in whatever format is desired, and saved to appropriate location with metadata attached.

Search
The most obvious, visible improvement in the SharePoint search infrastructure for 2010 is the incorporation of the FAST search technology. This leads to improved performance and scalability. In addition, it adds a number of enhanced capabilities, including a content-processing pipeline, metadata extraction, visual search, and advanced linguistics.

Also, the ability to index and search data imported through BCS, and improved ability to build connectors to search external content sources, means that search within SharePoint has the potential to be the primary search provider for enterprise solutions.

It remains to be seen how the new search technologies, along with the ability to customize the search and the result UI, will affect the need for third party search products.

Out in the Cloud
As I said in a previous column, cloud computing was a major focus at Microsoft’s Professional Developers’ Conference last November. Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing offering, went into commercial operations as of the new year.

While it is not likely many firms will be building applications from scratch in the cloud, there is a great potential for cloud computing to impact how you run your infrastructure. As we move forward, more and more ISVs will be offering their products in a SaaS model hosted in the cloud. This provides a number of opportunities for firms to offload the implementation and support of some of their systems. This has some fairly obvious cost advantages.

One example available right now is Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). This is a subscription-based, hosted solution providing MS Exchange Online, MS SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. In this model, you only pay for licenses you need, and can scale seamlessly as your needs grow. In addition, you are relieved of responsibility for maintaining the hardware, keeping up-to-date with all the patches Microsoft releases, etc.

This has been a summary of some thoughts on what all of the new releases from Microsoft coming in the next few months could mean in the real world. I am sure there a many more ways these changes could help your staff be more productive and your systems cost you less to implement and support. 

 

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