Blog Site template in SharePoint 2010 (repost)

Installing SharePoint Server 2010

Anyone with experience installing SharePoint 2007 will be happy to hear that the process is not that different in 2010. Anyone who wanted an easier deployment and installation tool in 2010 over 2007 will be unhappy with this so overall I am more unhappy than happy.

Need to install passphrases to add servers to farm is a new feature but not that major.

Just 2010

I am going to try to blog only about 2010 from now on. This is mostly because the 2010 UI and UX have finally caught up with the rest of the web. For about 6 years now as I have worked with SharePoint I have had to put my web designer hat away. Now with 2010 things I have been pushing out of my head about proper web for half a decade I can now openly think about. Now with SharePoint 2010 these proper methods are all coming together.

Master Pages and SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Themes and Resources for Upgrading a Custom Master Page - SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land:

"SharePoint 2010 ships with both SharePoint 2007 master pages and page layouts as well as the new SharePoint 2010 master pages. One of the major things to be aware of is the build in minimalist masterpage a concept that grew up from the community in SharePoint 2010 with Heather Solomon. In the box you’ll find v4.master, default.master, and minimal.master. Default.master is the old masterpage if you just upgraded. v4.master is the new SharePoint 2010 master page with the ribbon and other visuals. The new minimal.master is as it self describes. It is has a minimal set of controls and no navigation. Developers especially those working with a complete custom design will be pleased with this design."

Microsoft has carried over the default master page from 2007. You will also be able to bring over any master pages you team has developed in SharePoint 2007 to run in SharePoint 2010. The users will see no change and it makes for a fairly quick migration.

But this would be a very short sighted win. v4.master and minimal.master are the two master pages you want to move your Enterprise to as soon as possible, and if possible you would be much better off rebuilding much of the logic and layout you may have already created in SharePoint 2007 by building new master pages with minimal.master.

Now this is that eternal gray area where business conflicts with technology. A business community might see it rather simply. Migration to 2010 will add better backup support and scalability but as long as SharePoint 2007 master pages can be imported over why waste the time and effort to just rebuild what you want in a new web page? It is a hard one to answer for a technologist. But SharePoint 2010 offers a lot of great advantages in the new master pages that would be well worth the time of converting.

Said simply SharePoint 2001, 2003 and 2007 used web page technology out of the late 1990s. SharePoint before 2010 used the table element as its principle tool of layout. A SharePoint 2007 portal OTB gave you a front page with tables inside of tables inside of tables. SharePoint 2010 moves to the use of DIV tags, which most of the rest of the web started doing around 2003. DIV tags have some significant business advantages you can make to the business, here quoted from a post back in 2003:


Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered: Everything on one page):

"
• make your pages load faster


• lower your hosting costs


• make your redesigns more efficient and less expensive


• help you maintain visual consistency throughout your sites


• get you better search engine results


• make your sites more accessible to all viewers and user agents
"

Now only were SharePoint sites slow to download and search, but default.master SharePoint 2007 based pages keep you in to world of long post backs. Each time you do anything in a SharePoint 2007 site you need post a request back to the server, which needs to serve up another Table heavy page which is low to render. Modification to TABLE heavy pages can be extremely complex and working with the old default.master page was always a time consuming and deeply frustrating job. So SharePoint 2007 based master pages and layout elements will take up time on the server and time of the user.

The new SharePoint 2010 pages will load and render faster because of div tags. Because of AJAX and JavaScript their use will be more seamless and visually interesting. This also means less demand on your servers. Your development team will have less trouble creating new sites or editing old ones. Your business needs to be aware that sooner or later they will need to make the migration, and the longer they wait the more money will be wasted in resources, time, effort.

Perhaps the killer app is accessibility and search time. Accessible XHTML is not just easier for disabled individuals to use, it is much easier to different machines channels and search technology to use. My rule is that accessible documents are well formed documents with clear meaning. DIV tages not only break off content, but they can be richly tag in ways that make their meaning clear. They also offer much greater control of layout. Using JavaScript DIV tags can be turned on and off so your site becomes far more interactive.

With SharePoint 2010 Microsoft has finally caught up with most of the rest of the Web Development world. For a long time SharePoint could not carry its wait in the area of rich UI or UX. People who created very rich UI found they could not build on top of SharePoint. Now that has all ended.

Also I think not just with SharePoint, but introducing your entire firm to the accessibility of clearly defined content headings and labels will improve overall search of information, reduce content production, and make it far easier to re-skin content. Many firms have establish word templates with a great deal of styling and generally very confusing heading styles. These documents will also have embedded branding which is isolated in the document and multiplied by the billions in the company. Authors start working in the template, inheriting all these issues before they even being working. Formatting usually is only there for style and the logical nature of content is utterly lost. A well formed accessible document should use styles for sections like Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, Body, Quote, Strong, Reference, and Note. If you Word styles are not this clear or logical you are wasting money on storage, reducing search effectiveness, and making content migration harder.

I am personally extremely excited about all of this. For a long time Word and SharePoint were continuing some bad behaviours on document formation. Now with SharePoint embracing of XHTML and DIV tags, and Office 2007 and 2010 embracing XML standard of DOCX, your firm can have smaller documents, more reusable documents, documents easier to search, and easier to re-skin. In the modern world of business this will mean you can convert masses of binary data much faster in to the right answer. This is all inline with WC3 standards and can only benefit your firm.

I understand that all of this will take some time. But with the emerging Semantic Web and the flood of unformatted information coming in on firms, perhaps the time is right to fight this battle which started in the late 1990s.

Now there is going to be some training time as the Web Development community who have been using DIV tags and precise accessible lightweight designs with in page functionality discover that SharePoint 2010 opens all the Content Management, Enterprise Scale and acceleration tools to the higher end of development.

Office moves to the Cloud

Microsoft is playing to the strength of its global reach. "Microsoft Office Web Apps" will be available to more than 500 million people using free Windows Live services such as Hotmail, online storage Skydrive and Live Messenger.

BBC News - Microsoft's two-pronged strategy for Office 2010

This move by Microsoft could radically change everything. I am a long time users of both Microsoft Office Live and Google Docs and neither is really anything to write home about. But organizations and users are desperate to cut costs.

For example, after forking out the money for a New Windows 7 machines and a new iPhone I was not about to also pay for Office for my own personal use. I use a combination of Open Office and Google Docs. I recently finished a MA with all my work done in a combination of Open Office and Google Docs. It worked much better than when I had a server in the house running WSS. But is was still not really Enterprise ready.

The Cloud is certainly the way of the future. But presently the Cloud has been pushing people away from the document towards the email, tweet, blog post, friend link, photo and movie.

Docs remain either locked on the client, distributed in an uncontrolled fashion in emails, or siloed in SharePoint work spaces or file shares.

Microsoft has it right that if the Document is going to survive it needs to be transformed in to a more fluid web object. It needs to keep the clear boundaries that make a document unique from a blog or wiki. Taking Office in to the Cloud and making it free will reduce communication costs while giving the users of Facebook what they have come to expect: free software.

I think this is a brilliant move by Microsoft in principle, lets see how it works out. In the past Web Document objects have suffered from limitations of browser technology. IE6 is still deeply embedded on a lot of machines and desktop roll outs could take 4 years to upgrade.

Most seriously in the face of cuts many CIO might decide that the current client system is working well enough to not risk an upgrade which only PROMISES to reduce costs. Massive Luddites caused by budget conscious IT departments more worried about keeping their jobs than innovation are a massive risk right now.

I have seen, and even touched, 2010

The demo I saw was around the standard Collaboration Portal of SharePoint.

Thoughts, from a look and feel issue the improvements are simply evolutionary and not that impressive. One thing now is you can type text anywhere in a area, getting ride of the need to but content web parts to place plain text and graphics. I have always seen the content web part as the key part of making a SharePoint site work and it was nice to see that you can now add text, like instructions, everywhere.

BUT, overall there was NOTHING new for the UI of this Portal. There was a button marked feedback that I was desperate to touch but we were all there for accessibility. The talk was about SharePoint 2010 accepting Accessible Rich Internet Applications ARIA. ARIA tags can make reader devices more aware of the roles of items on a page. So if you use them right it will mean things like JAWS will have an easier time reading SharePoint.

Accessibility with current SharePoint is awful and this could be an improvement, but we didn't actually see SharePoint 2010 run with JAWS so lets not celebrate yet.

Microsoft is also talking about being closer to WCAG 2.0 and XHTML. But it is important to state that they goal is "closer to" rather than "fully compliant." I would go to say you probably could not make the HTML that SharePoint 2007 creates LESS XHTML compliant if you wanted to, so this may be no big thing.

Looking at the standard Portal SharePoint 2010 did not look very impressive. But the "feedback" button has stuck in my imagination. I gather that there are some wonderful new social networking tools added to extend beyond MySites. As of yet I have not gotten a chance to see them.

Also the cries for online Sandboxes is clearly becoming a scream to Microsoft. Please if you blog or Twitter just keep up the pressure on Microsoft. The rep who I saw seemed to not even understand that the beta was beyond almost all of our machines. I fear that SharePoint has been taken over by marketing people who don't really understand the issues involved with 64 bit and they will need to be educated by the user population that we need support in accessing SharePoint from machines with 32 bit OS. It was good to hear that my issue was part of a choir of users and hopefully Microsoft will get the point soon enough.

But all in all, 2010 is an evolutionary step not involving radical change but also not offering vastly improved UI. You can probably start designing your projects for 2010 now as long as you have 64 bit server architecture. But you are not going to get the wow factor MOSS 2007 produced. 2010 looks like an improved MOSS 2007.

On the other hand it was not a bloated mess, so I am starting to think we are not looking at SharePoint Vista here.

Too many new SharePoint 2010 SKUs

I realize there’s a theory at Microsoft that product names of business software can be more unwieldy and matter less than those of Microsoft’s consumer-focused products. Yes, SharePoint is a complicated, multifaceted Swiss army knife of a product, but it sure seems like all these SKUs and components would make it tough on customers trying to tread water in the SharePoint swamp.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4294

I know it way way to early to say, but I keep getting a bad feeling about SharePoint 2010. I hope I am wrong but I think we will get a Vista or Office 2007 level consumer selection in the next 6 months. I am looking for a new killer feature that makes it worth upgrading to 64 bit?

SharePoint 2007 was a no brainer, the 2003 product was a collection of limits and frustrating features.

But what makes 2010 better? In 2006 it was pretty easy to sell 2007:

• Easier to install
• Better interface
• Better administration environment
• More templates
• Better search experience
• You probably have not implemented 2003 yet so lets start at 2007
  

Please someone tell me what is the 2010 story here? Lots of people have 2007, why should they migrate?

SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part, and why it is not a big deal

SharePoint 2010 Enhancements for End Users: New Silverlight Web Part & Improved UI for Adding Web Parts to a Page - SharePoint 2010 - Bamboo Nation



SharePoint 2010 Enhancements for End Users: New Silverlight Web Part & Improved UI for Adding Web Parts to a Page - SharePoint 2010 - Bamboo Nation

Bamboo Software, having seen the same demo as the rest of us, has ripped a few slides to make a piece promoting the Silverlight Web Part in 2010.

Well I have only seen the video demo from which the 2 screen grabs above come from. It seems to show that you have an OTB Silverligth Web Part, but all it does is let you place silverlight applications in your sharepoint page, not create or edit Silverlight with SharePoint content.

SharePoint can already do this, not only SharePoint 2007 but 2003 and I assume 2001. Let me show.



To prove I am not cheating I use a VM of Windows 2003 with WSS 2.0 running on Sun VirtualBox VM technology on Ubuntu Linux. The ultimate 'nothing up my sleeves kind of demo'. Here you see me installing Silverlight on the VM. (By the way this took significantly less time on VirtualBox than on VirtualPC).



I actually have created hundreds of Silverlights over the past year. Most went down with Popfly. But Photosynth is still there and seems to be growing. So I rip the silverlight Photosynth from my Photosynth.com page.



Now I just edit a simple content web editor web part.



Just past the URL for the Photosynth Silverlight in to the html editor



And you have a WSS 2.0 site running a rich silverlight 3-D photosynth.

So as it stands today the entire Silverlight Web Part in 2010 just streamlines function that already exists in in SharePoint 2003 and 2007.

Very disappointing.

What I wanted was something like Popfly that would allow Silverlight mashups of Sharepoint material for projects. As of right now you don't have that.

Hot news and a Synth

Above is a synth made from Istanbul

And the news concerns some talk, pretty strong talk, that SharePoint 2010 (no longer MOSS) will finally support full virtualisation!!!!! Virtualisation of MOSS has generally been done with the DB in hardware. You as recommended to also virtualise the Index Role but because it goes on in the background smaller implementation won't feel it if you do not.

This is not because of SQL or VMWare, it is because of SharePoint (after years of asking I got this answer finally). SharePoint farms don't work particularly well with virtual DB and Index.