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Some Thoughts on SharePoint 2010

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This week I attended the launch of Office 2010 which included the launch of SharePoint 2010 and the other Office programs such as Project 2010 and Visio 2010. There is much to love about the new range of Microsoft products, and much to be wary of also, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about it.

The SharePoint Conference is coming up in Sydney on June 16 and 17. It is a community run conference (so not an official Microsoft event), but there is a number of great speakers. They will cover a lot of the new stuff in SharePoint 2010 and will cover SharePoint 2007 versions also. Part of the idea for writing this post is a great competition that SBTUG and SWUG are running to give away a ticket to the conference, which I would very much like to win.

There is so much that I want to learn about SharePoint 2010, and so many great new features – but I am uncertain about diving in right now. I just don’t think that it’s going to have the level of adoption in the next few years to warrant learning all about it right now. I think SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is here to stay for another few years yet, until organisations are willing to tackle the upgrade.

The issue is, that to get the benefit out of SharePoint 2010, you need to upgrade a huge amount of software and hardware. You will need:

  • One (or more) 64bit server(s) running Windows Server 2008 (and preferably Windows Server 2008 R2 to get the most out of some of the new features).
  • Office 2010 for all staff that want to use documents stored on SharePoint (which is probably ALL staff), as the cool new features such as multiple document authors and some of the really cool new OneNote features.
  • Windows 7 because Office 2010 runs so much better on Windows 7 and the cool new features in Server 2008 R2 such as Branch Caching work only with Windows 7
  • Exchange Server 2o1o because there are some great features in Outlook 2010 that only work with Exchange 2010, and I’m sure there are some SharePoint features that only work with the new Exchange also.
  • Viso 2010 because the new Workflow features in SharePoint integrate so well with Visio 2010 – and not just any Visio – it has to be the Premium version of Viso. Also, the new data driven diagrams and diagrams that can be published directly to a SharePoint site make it a must-have for the power users in the organisation.
  • You probably want to also invest in Visual Studio 2010, only because if all the end users are going 2010 then the developers are going to want to too, but also because it also integrates very nicely with the new Workflow features in SharePoint 2010.
  • Probably SQL Server 2008 R2, especially if the organisation deals in very large files – because there is a great new feature in SharePoint 2010 called Remote Blob Storage which allows you to store large files on the file server, rather than inside the SharePoint database. (Yes, it only requires SQL server 2008, but as you will be building this new infrastructure now, you will get R2).
  • And if you are going to go this far, you may as well go the whole hog and get the new version of Office Communicator (not quite out yet) and Project Server 2010 as it integrates with SharePoint nicely too.

So after you have spent all that money, you may think, well SharePoint 2010 is free with Server 2008 so I don’t have to worry about that – well start worrying. To get many of the really cool new features of SharePoint, you really need the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint 2010 – this gives you Excel Services, Performance Point Services, InfoPath Forms Services, Visio Services, and the advanced features of the new FAST Search. And then why not integrate your external website with the Intranet and run SharePoint as an externally facing website. Thankfully the licencing for this has come down a bit in price (due to the External Connector Standard Licence), but it’s still a hefty amount in anyone’s language.

But Wow! If you did do all of these upgrades and got it all humming, that would really be a nice set of tools to work with, and you can call me to come and work with you :).

So after saying all this about SharePoint 2010, why would I want to go to the SharePoint conference and learn much more about SharePoint 2010? Because it rocks! There are so many cool new features in the whole 2010 suite of products, that it is like the Office suite has grown up – they were previously just playing around, and now they’ve gotten serious. And for large organisation that wants a really fantastic integrated suite of products, they will just have to get 2010!

Some of the really cool features that I want to learn more about are:

  • Integration with Office Web Apps
  • The whole range of new Business Intelligence features with Performance Point Services, Excel Power Pivot and the new Business Data Connectivity features (formerly the BDC).
  • The Services (eg Excel, Word, Access, InfoPath, PerformancePoint, Viso Services) and how to use them – eg automating the creation of Word documents behind the scenes with Word Services.
  • All the new Social Networking features – I’m not sure they will be a “facebook for the office” but they will be a start into social apps for the enterprise.
  • The new accessibility features, which I don’t think are 100% accessible yet, but they are built in – not an afterthought like SharePoint 2007.
  • All the new design tools and theming of SharePoint, including XSLT styling of lits and being able to import themes from Powerpoint.
  • Integrating Silverlight into SharePoint – it will be very interesting to see what’s possible with that in the future.
  • The new workflows engine and the integration with Visio and Visual Studio.
  • The FAST search and what is possible now for full enterprise wide search with SharePoint.

So I think that there is enough really cool new things to keep me busy for two days at the SharePoint Conference, and I really hope that I can get to play with these new tools in a real live environment sooner, rather than later.

Note: There is not a lot of hyperlinks to the Office 2010 stuff as the new Office site was not live at the time of this post (even though it was a few days after the official launch), and the SharePoint 2010 site is still lacking a lot of detail around specific features.

SBTUG WordPress Extravaganza

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At SBTUG this week we are having a WordPress Extravaganza – everything you need to know about running WordPress as the CMS of choice for your business. My talk will showcase a few of the WordPress sites that I have done without having fantastic skills in CSS and PHP – see my Portfolio Page – and the great features available in WordPress.com, including how this very site was created for a total cost of US$12 / year (+ domain) – see WordPress.com for your domain. I will also talk about WordPress Themes, CSS, and the benefits of choosing a Premium Theme over a Free Theme.

CSS

Firstly, to create any website, you need to understand some CSS. It is well worth taking the time to learn the basics. After months of being too scared to touch the CSS in some of my sites, I decided the take the plunge and got Russ Weakly from Max Design to give me a day long crash course in CSS. For me it was well worth paying the money for a one on one course, but Russ is starting a series of CSS, Javascript and Accessibility courses soon, and I would highly recommend his courses to learn CSS. If you don’t want to do a course, there are some good web resources available and I would start with the W3Schools.com CSS Basics course. There is also CSSTutorial.net which also covers the basics. This is a good resource for showing how just changing the CSS affects the layout and structure of the site. No amount of CSS knowledge is going to benefit more than just playing. So start with Firebug in Firefox (or the IE Developer Toolbar if you have to use IE – it is Built into IE8 Developer Tools), or the Inspect Element command in Chrome. The great thing that Firebug (or the other tools) does is show you that CSS is just a series of boxes. And once you can understand that, then understanding CSS is a lot easier. These tools also allow you to test out changes, before committing your changes to your CSS file. Must Know CSS These are just a few of the CSS topics that I would recommend you need to know about.

And for some more advanced topics

And if you want to go the whole hog, the W3C CSS reference is not that difficult to understand once you know some of the terminology. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cover.html#minitoc

WordPress Themes

There are thousands of Themes for WordPress. They can be free or you can pay hundreds of dollars for Premium themes or even have one built especially for yourself (eg 99 Designs). The options are endless – and the choice is overwhelming. My suggestion is to just start somewhere, with a theme that you like the look of, but are just wanting to tweak a bit. That way there is less PHP tweaking and more just modifying the CSS. Also, using Firebug allows you to “steal” (sorry, borrow) ideas from other sites you like. I would also go down the path of buying a premium theme – one that costs up to say US$150 as the support will be worth it at some stage. One thing that you need to be aware of is that the CSS in these themes is usually based on a CSS framework (see below) or has a lot of extra CSS in there to cover the multiple theme options, or they have CSS elements applied via PHP, or worse still, they have 3 or 4 CSS files and you are not exactly sure where to change the CSS. This can be very confusing, and make a beautiful theme that you love, be very difficult to work with.

Some of the terminology around themes can also be confusing, such as Child Themes, Magazine Themes, Portfolio Themes,  Theme Options, etc etc.  Also themes can have built in options such as LightBox, Thumbnail creation, built in SEO features, multiple sidebars or zones etc etc. The only real way to work all this out is to try one and see how it works for you.

CSS Frameworks

Many Themes use CSS Frameworks. There are a heap of different Frameworks, but mostly what they do is set up a grid for you to work with (usually 950 or 960 pixels wide). You can usually tell if your theme is based on one of these frameworks if it has a Div named Container, as this is the very common layout of the white box on a darker background. One of the widely used CSS Frameworks is Blueprint, and you can see how the BluePrint grid works with this example http://www.blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/grid.html. There is also a basic video about Blueprint which is helpful to get your head around any type of grid based framework. Most of the Frameworks make use of the CSS construct of applying multiple classes to the one element. This is what happens with the “span-24 last” type syntax. The Span-24 class is applying the width of the box, and the “last” class is setting the right margin of the right hand column – usually to be zero pixels. Frameworks can be good, and easy enough to work with, and they give you a way of structuring your site that is at least going to look consistent with elements aligned to this invisible grid. However, if you want to control your site to the nearest pixel, you may not want to use a constrictive grid. Usually when you mess around with a grid, you will stuff it up and make it look ugly.

Base Themes

WordPress themes have become big businesses and there are a number of large Themes that are now base themes for many others. The biggest of the lot is of course, Thesis and another is Thematic.

Favourite Themes

The free theme that I used that is based on the grid framework is from Graph Paper Press and it’s called Modularity Lite. It was quite a good free theme, and there is the premium Modularity Theme also.

WordPress has an extensive gallery of Free Themes, but the choice there is quite overwhelming.

The Magazine Theme I used is Arthemia Premium from Colorlabs Project (also see JobSeekr by Michael Specht – his blog is Cutline Theme). Colourlabs have some great themes and the support is good also.

Other notable theme sites are Woo Themes (Craig Bailey’s Xen SEO site) , Elegant Themes (eg TechRepeater also by Craig Bailey) and Themeforest.

And last but not least, this site is the Vigilance Theme by ThemeFoundry, which just happens to be included in the themes offered in WordPress.com.

Update October 2011

Deleted some broken links.