UPDATE: Since I wrote this original post in 2011 Microsoft has released the mature ready to go Office365 for the Cloud. And it is a vast improvement and a real game changer.
It has a simpler new layout which works well with tablets, not just Surfaces. I use my Office365 on my iPad and it is great. It also has a wonderful new App Development model which will make it much easier to add SharePoint to the entire Enterprise. Things are just getting better and better from the Cloud.
Office 365 beta is here. And the wait is almost worth it. Almost. First the good news. You get SharePoint and Office Web Applications in a Cloud solution. And this is real SharePoint 2010. You even have the ability to start workflows, edit page layout, set site properties and even open the page in Designer 2010. Everything with the same ribbon and SharePoint 2010 because it is SharePoint 2010.
With a basic under 25 user Office 365 beta you get Outlook Web Application, which looks and feels like the real office. You get a basic web site which frankly is terrible. But the real killer app is, or will be, Cloud based document Management using Office Web Apps and SharePoint 2010 Team Sites!
Now on my computer I could not create document using the Web App, but I would imagine they will fix that soon or I will fix my machine. Oh and you get Lync too but frankly anyone in a small business who needs another cloud based IM service must be living under a rock.
Frankly for a 25 person of less business Lynch will be useless give Skype and other basic IM services. But the ability to use SharePoint and Outlook in the Cloud is pretty cool.
And I am going to be clear about this: Office 365 beta is not kind of SharePoint 2010, or something that looks like SharePoint 2010; it is SharePoint 2010. This is Microsoft breaking in to the Cloud in a massive way. Good job folks, now get the phone to sell.
1. Requirement to convert to 64 bit infrastructure.
2. New features generally are Ajax reworks of existing features, that people are used to.
3. Sudden loss of IE 6 support.
4. People are not yet using SharePoint 2007 to its full potential.
5. Lack of JavaScript and Ajax among SharePoint developers.
6. Lack of downloadable VM that can be easily run on most 32 bit dev machines for learning.
In a word, I can't show SharePoint 2010 on my work laptop, I can't view it on the IE browser that is the company standard browser needed for all our Oracle and custom apps, and once I get it running most people can't really notice any difference.
I fear that, just like Vista, the overhead is far far to great to make the upgrade worth it and we may have to wait until SharePoint 2012 (SharePoint 5) to get any real upgrade.
But don't fear. Microsoft is wonderful at getting itself out of messes like these.
But I will have to take back my 2010 only promise. For the time being SharePoint is SharePoint 2007 and I will have to keep writing about this for some time.
I have just heard about another small 2007 to SharePoint 2010 migration failing. Despite my own effort to force through 2010 SharePoint implementations for various reason I am being pushed back to 2007. This did NOT happen with 2003.
SharePoint 2010 is a nice evolution from from 2007, but I am not sure that end user benefits will make the movement to 64 bit (still very hard for companies) worth it.
I imagine in 2011 we will see a lot more movement to 2010, but it will be slower than the take up of 2007.
SharePoint 2010 introduces a number of enhancements to the end user experience.
The new SharePoint UI will produce XHTML, presenting content in div tags rather then the nested tables of SharePoint 2007.
This will enhance accessibility to WCAG 2.0 AA standards. Use of Div also enhance the ability of search engines to index data.
The new SharePoint UI brings in AJAX, allowing continual flow back and forth of data from the browser to the back system.
This replaces SharePoint 2007 need to constantly be post back to the server.
The new UI is also more fluid to edit for the user, introducing a Ribbon like Office 2007 for editing and removing the need to work with a set of web parts.
The Ribbon will me that users, and even administrators, will have to spend less time fishing around for the functions they need.
Replacing a page of web parts with a single Office document like design interface will make it easier for users to edit the pages.
Now one of the things we always heard about SharePoint 2003 and 2007 is that users found them very easy to use. So you might wonder why bother make such changes to the UI.
The key element to consider is that a UI should not only be easy to use but powerful as well.
Most traditional EMC systems were powerful but not easy to use. This meant that they were generally only take up by a small set of skilled experts who could do a lot with them.
SharePoint 2007 UI went to the other end and introduced a UI that was easy to use but not powerful. This meant that a lot of staff took up SharePoint, but it limited what could be done with it.
SharePoint systems were often limited to documents shares, WCM intranets, and exposing links and lists of data.
The technology behind the SharePoint 2007 UI made it very difficult to modify the UI. Anything beyond basic branding could be very time consuming.
So though the SharePoint 2007 has proven very easy to use for certain key tasks like document sharing, it has proven hard to enhance to other tasks and hard to integrate to a larger set of system.
SharePoint 2007 has also proven very hard to build rich real time experiences that we see in sites like Flickr, Facebook, any of the other Web 2.0 sites.
Microsoft has clearly taken notice of the rich interface of Facebook and has provided a number of new features to making creating new SharePoint bases interfaces that are more powerful much easier.
These include AJAX, which allows real time flow of information between the browser and the back end data. This will reduce the need for so many post backs. It will also create a smoother experience for the user. And AJAX will greatly increase the power you can build in to SharePoint sites. AJAX means you will be able to interact with several different data sources and systems using Web Services in the browser.
SharePoint now has an extended JavaScript API which allows you to interact with most of the Objects in a SharePoint. Now you can access and manipulate data and objects in SharePoint with JavaScript in the same way you have been able to do in the DOM for years.
Designers will also be happy to learn that Microsoft has introduced new Master Pages including a simple master page which will make it much easier to write custom SharePoint pages. Many developers found it very hard to work with the master page that came with SharePoint 2010.
Also with XHTL using div tags replaicng HTML using tables for layout it is going to be much easier to build sites for mobile devices. Lack of mobile presence has been a read problem with previous SharePoint. With the new SharePoint UI it will be much easier to build simpler XHTML pages that will show up in more mobile devices.
Now nothing comes for free and the main prices many organisations will have to say for SharePoint 2010 UI will be the need to go off IE 6. But given IE 6 security issues this is something that they should do anyways.
Now what about organisations which have invested large amounts in creating rich SharePoint 2007 interfaces: does this mean that they need to simply throw away their work?
Well the answer is no, SharePoint 2010 will continue with a version of the same default master page as in 2007 available. Now this has been altered slightly so you will have to do some test and redesign, but in most cases it will be a migration task rather than an extensive transformation task.
So with the new UI in SharePoint 2010 your developers will be able to create very rich interactive environments that will more closely meet your business requirements. With 2010 SharePoint fully enters the world of Web 2.0 interface design.
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.
"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:
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.
Here are some questions I have been asked about SharePoint. Here are some answers:
What is the difference between 2007 and 2010?
SharePoint 2010 is a significant evolution over 2007, but not a revolution. SharePoint 2007 was a radical change from 2003. This upgrade is much more of a natural evolution, building on the benefits of 2007, adding some new user interface features, and improving some back-end problems.
But there are some significant differences between the two. First SharePoint 2010 has greatly enhanced the web pages it creates. Microsoft has embraced many of the Web 2.0 features popular with sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Google docs. This gives a much more intuitive and seamless user interface. It also means that firms will finally have to upgrade from IE 6 to a 21st Century browser like Firefox 3.5 or IE 7 or later.
Also SharePoint 2010 now only runs on 64 bit servers. Many SharePoint 2007 builds used some or all 32 bit servers. This is no longer possible with SharePoint 2010 and the entire server farm will need to run 64 bit OS.
What impact will moving from 2007 to 2010 have on an organization?
That depends on how big and how customized your existing SharePoint 2007 solution is. If you are using a Out of the Box SharePoint 2007 with maybe a few hundred GB of data storage in SQL Server upgrade will be a matter of building the new server and moving the data over.
If you team has spend significant time creating your own Web Controls you should be able to migrate all to SharePoint 2010, but you will need to test each Web Control. Generally first maybe roll-out a few dozen such features at the most so this may not be a problem, but if you are company which has produced a large number of custom features in MOSS 2007 you could have a real headache.
Perhaps most serious is a SharePoint implementation that is highly customised. If you have written a lot of SharePoint 2007 master pages you can still use them as is in SharePoint 2010. But you then lose the accessibility improvements of 2010. And there is no guarantee that these 2007 master pages will be supported long in to the future. So you will want to get your design team to rebuild your old master pages in to new 2010 master pages using the much improve XHTML.
Also SharePoint 2010 is going to force an upgrade from IE 6. IE 6 is not supported for SharePoint 2010 so if a firm has a lot of IE 6 desktops a desktop refresh and/or upgrade will be in order.
What are new key benefit features of the 2010 output?
SharePoint 2010 has made extensive improvements to the user interface. This will make using and administer SharePoint much easier.
For users SharePoint has added a large number of "Web 2.0" tool and widgets that will make using the tool much easier. In the traditional SharePoint almost everything you did involved needed to send a request back to the server. This is experienced as a blink and reload of the page and has been for years a major complaint of users. SharePoint 2010 users technologies like AJAX to allow you to make changes to your content without having to leave your page.
This will make for a much smoother use of the tool. The user will have a lot more smaller windows popping up on the page rather than having to change pages.
For the administrators and power users SharePoint introduces a top ribbon like the Office 2007 and Office 2010 ribbon. This, and a more logical central administration tool will make it much easier to remember what are key tools and where they are.
SharePoint has also enhanced its soical networking tools and metadata tools. It will now be possible to get everyone in the company using the same hierarchy of key concepts to tag their data.
What will 2007 experts need to learn for 2010?
Experts will find the core of SharePoint 2010 very similiar to SharePoint 2007 and will have very little effort to start creating and editing sites in the new tool. SharePoint 2010 introduces two things that SharePoint experts didn't have to know in 2007. Firstly the user interface uses lots of JavaScript, AJAX and additional Web 2.0 UI tools that Web Developers have been using for years, but which SharePoint developers could be happily unaware of. This all changes, and the SharePoint expert should learn more about XHTML, JavaScript, and AJAX.
SharePoint 2010 also provides a large number of ECM tools that earlier version did not have. From a central hub it is now possible to create and deploy fileplans throughout the Enterprise. This is old stuff of traditional EDRMS and ECM developers but it totally new in SharePonit 2010 and will require some learning.
The largest change will be learning to work with the ribbon, but that is no harder than going from Office 2003 to Office 2007.
Will companies be able to avoid an upgrard and stay with 2007?
Yes, for a while. Probably it is not a good idea to migrate until the first or second service pack are released. But in time the upgrade is inevitable. SharePoint 2007 should not be looked at as a product like Windows XP which will have a decade long life. SharePoint 2007 will almost certainly be out of service by 2015. So sooner or later all firms will have to update.
A modern WCM system has to meet many needs across a business but the number one goal has always be to empower the people who own and create content to easily publish content.
Though SharePoint 2010 is an evolutionary release, it promises to fix some of the real pains in the arse with 2007 and I am starting ot get very positive about it.
Key things I am looking forward to are:
Fast search over SharePoint weak search
Reuse of Content Types throughout the Enterprise without coding (this is a real headache to proper ECM)
End of the 100 GB database limit in SharePoint (which has cost me no end to grief, though in reality if you could back up a 1 TB SharePont 2003 or 2007 database its fine)
I think there can only be three views on Wikis in SharePoint 2007. People either hate all wikis, they don't hate wikis but they hate SharePoint 2007wikis, or they have never used SharePoint wikis in 2007.
I think SharePoint 2007 is essentially an alternative to Wiki Media, and it has all the problems of Wiki Media. Its very hard to use correctly, you need to have programming skills to format things, and you need to know what you are linking to before hand, which limits its "organic growth issues."
Beyond that you have a terrible "copy and paste" problem. Allowing you to copy and paste in word documents I guess is suppose to make SharePoint 2007 wikis easier to use, but I have found that it causes more trouble than it is worth. I have seen that most wikis that are not centrally controlled and extensively planned out inevitably become mess or formats and layouts that have been pasted in to the document and now are embedded HTML. Fixing a wiki of this kind can be a real nasty problem.
Personally I wanted to see SharePoint 2010 wikis more like the wikispace.com tool.
Wikispaces I have found is much easier to grow organically because pasting works better and editing is cleaner and has a better UI. Linking provides a button and a tool and I could work for hours without really "breaking" the wiki. SharePoint 2007 wikis could be broken. Formatting got to be a mess and links were hard to find. I kept finding I would make a link and SharePoint would create a new wiki page. All the time I would forget there was one page for the singular and one page for the plural. I could create a rule that definitions should be in the singular but this felt unnatural and I found myself lapsing. In the end I gave up on SharePoint wiki at home and moved all the wiki work I had done on SharePoint to my wikispaces page in the Cloud and have never looked back.
So SharePoint 2010 had a lot of nuts and bolts issues to resolve which so far it has not. There is still not a easy to use button to link a wiki and though their is a keyboard shortcut to help wiki linking its nothing like the Wikispaces tool.
Rather than repair the core WIkip Microsoft has seemed to have just created an Enterprise Wiki that uses SharePoint's Web Content Management Publishing to control the look and publishing of a wiki. Permission to speak freely on this one. It seems that Microsoft has taken the two of the worst functions and made one new function out of it. SharePoint has also allowed used to ad web parts to a body of a Wiki but again this seems to be combining two bad things to create an even more evil new thing.
Okay I have not had a chance yet to work on a SharePoint 2010 Wiki like I have worked on SharePoint 2007 wikis, but so far I have not seen my wish list satisfied. I realy didn't want to make a publishing wiki because frankly the publishing feature in SharePoint is kind of weak and not really what people like about the tool. SharePoint is about light weight easy collaboration, and the wiki has been a very weak part of it.
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 ApplicationsARIA. 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.
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.
