SharePoint 2010 Features (New and upgraded) – The good stuff!!!

As I promised, here are all my tweets (http://twitter.com/givenscj) on new stuff in SP2010:

Update (12/4/2009)

  • UserProfile join to BDC can only use "integer", use to be able to use "string"
  • XLViewer.aspx has lost some properties
    • RowsToDisplay, ColumnsToDisplay
  • Crawl Rules can "Follow regular expression syntax" or can "Match case"
  • Crawl Rules have more authentication options
    • Client certificate
    • Form credentials
    • Use Cookies
  • Host Distribution Rules – allows you to distribute crawl loads across multiple crawl databases (have to have more than one crawl database)
  • Crawler Impact Rules – allows you to stagger crawling for specific content sources
  • Federated Locations – has a set of preloaded locations (one points to Bing)
    • Multiple supported authentication models for federated search results
  • Scopes – No "Update Now" button, forced to wait for timer job to run (every 20 minutes)
  • Single Sign On APIs are now deprecated, you must implement new interface ISecureStoreProvider
    • NOTE: there is no provider in the beta, so SharePoint Designer and custom apps can not utilize the Secure Store as of yet
  • Lots of bugs in BCS/BDS so far, worth waiting till another beta build to test things
  • InfoPath has two pieces to it now
    • InfoPath Designer – menus and controls have moved, plan on spending some time to find things!  When in doubt, go to the "File" ribbon menu item
    • InfoPath Filler
  • When working with Custom Authentication, Visual Studio uses the Framework directory, SharePoint uses the Framework64 directory, this means changes should be applied to BOTH machine.config files!
  • TimerJobs can be assigned to various servers in the farm, this means we can have more than 10 web applications in our farm
  • Content Deployment has lost some features
    • Quick Deploy is gone
    • Validation of Site Definition for deployment path is more strict, it must now match not only the Site Definition, but the actuall configuration too  (STS#0 != STS#1)
    • Catch 22 loop occurs for stuff that worked back in 2007, recommend waiting till next beta comes out to test
  • Information Rights Management requires the new Active Directory Right Management Server.  The older Windows Rights Management server will not run with SharePoint 2010
  • The new BETA version of ForeFront 2010 security for sharepoint is out.  The older ForeFront will not work.  There are bugs in both SharePoint and Forefront that will keep you from being able to test them

Update (11/6/2009)

  • Sharepoint Designer 2010 generates Infopath instead of aspx forms for action tasks…that's awesome!!!
  • Sharepoint
    2010 "build dynamic string" action is now set to "displayonly" instead
    of "all", means it doesn't show up n workflow action list
  • Sharepoint designer 2010 Workflow – "Assign to do" action, has a "workflow lookup for a user" option…cool! – means you can now build runtime dynamically assigned todos

Update (11/5/2009)

  • Trace log file limiter (can limit based on GB size)
  • New Impersonation step in sharepoint designer workflows (will run as workflow creator)
  • New Workflow Source items for workflow usage:
    • Workflow Context
  • No backup/restore features with SharePoint Designer!  YES!
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 beta does not have the "Connect to another library" for data sources 🙁
  • Sharepoint Designer 2010 does not have the ability to do reports (files, shared content, problems, usage)
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 has the Visual Studio code snippet feature now!
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 has smart/locked editing to keep end users from screwing things up!
    • Editor and Advanced Editor mode

Update (11/4/2009)

  • There are ~2X as many classes and interfaces in 2010 object model versus the 2007 object model (and I thought it already had everything!)
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 allows users to create "custom actions" (call
    form, call url, workflow) on a list!  Now that is cool!
  • Ability to edit built in workflows with SharePoint Designer
  • Import and Export workflows from Visio

Update (11/3/2009)

  • New Site Definitions:
    • GroupBoard workspace (for tracking people and resources)
    • Vision Process workspace (for managing process documents in Visio – US and Metric based)
  • Site Collection Analytics includes Inventory reports for:
    • Storage Usage
    • Number of Sites
    • Number of Lists
    • Number of Libraries
    • and more…
  • Site Collection Custom search scope update time went from 60 secs to 4 days, wonder why?
  • Site Admins can create customized reports for site usage using Excel
  • Team Site Navigation links can now open in new browser window!
  • Team Site Navigation links can now be targeted at audiences!
  • New InfoPath webpart allows u 2 display InfoPath forms easily (must be published as content type and attached to library)
  • New Chart viewer web part allows you to point as lists and build a chart on a list column values…NICE!

Update (11/2/2009)

  • 5 Themes selectable for your sites
    • Users can customize a select few items with own colors
    • You can preview the theme before you apply it
  • Colleague Tracker can track on:

    • Birthdays and anniversaries

    • Profile property
      changes
    • Social Tagging
    • Note Board Posts
    • Authored Blog
    • Authored Document
    • Shared Pages
    • Out of Office Status
    • Membership changes

Update (10/30/2009)

  • You can click "Run Now" on all timer jobs…dangerous…liked it better the old way
  • Granular control of My Site Host (create it first, then setup My Sites in farm)
    • requires to to create the managed path "personal" (if that's the name you want anyway)
  • Site Def removes "Top Sites", possibly for social tagging features replacement
  • Instead of "My Site" its now "My SharePoint" – personal right? Has the following links:
    • My Tags and Notes
    • Tag or Note this Page
    • Add SharePoint Tagging to Browser
    • Recently Tagged Pages
    • Recently Noted Pages
  • New "Status" for your profile (similar to Twitter, Facebook, myspace)
  • My Site Alerts:
    • Notes on profile
    • Add of colleague
    • Suggested Colleague (I'm seeing facebook ex suggestion problem creep up here – don't have relationships with co-workers!)
  • My Site Profile Delegation
  • Profile properties are metadata based – AJAX autocomplete like features!
  • Sharepoint profile properties can be clicked to take you to FAST people search for matching profile properties
  • Same rules apply in 2010, a user must have a profile before you can add as a colleague and "follow"
  • Not only Users can have profiles, but you can create Organization profiles
    • Organization hierarchy's can be built
    • Organization can have a central team site
    • Organization can have members and leaders
    • At least one organization must be tied to a "manager"
    • New organization's can be categorized under other org's

Update (10/29/2009)

  • Item level Audience Targeting (but only with "Document" content types)
  • Document ID service assigns unqiue IDs based on a start string you specific at a site collection level (only with "Document" content types)
  • Content Rating at an item level (but doesn't process right away – timer job *sniff*)
  • Wiki site definition has moved to the "Publishing" tab and is called "Enterprise Wiki"
  • No more Internet vs. Intranet Publishing Site Definitions, only a single Publishing Site Definition
    • This is good, the def has removed Document Center, Reports, News and Sites sub sites from it (very bad practice in the previous site defs)
  • Site Definitions can have visibility features via the VisibilityFeatureDependency attribute (Site Def won't show up until you have a certain feature turned on)
  • Records Center site definition is redesigned, much more intuitive for beginners to figure out how to setup Records Routing and Holds!
  • Information Management Policies are enforced by Content Type on all lists by default
    • You can break this and revert to the old style of applying to all items in the list but new way is the right way!

Update (10/28/2009)

  • BDC schema changes were made, your app def files will need to be migrated:  Ref this post http://bit.ly/2bnZyc 
  • Not all lists get the new Ribbon (Picture Library, Survey)
  • Project Tasks can have predecessors (force completion of tasks before others finish)
  • Two new columns in a #sharepoint 2010 list (Item Child Column count and Folder Child Count), check em out!

Update (10/27/2009)

  • SharePoint 2010 Activity Stream is extensible (multiple applications can pump messages into stream)
  • Office on SharePoint server (2008 R2) still won't let you save back to document library (no WebDav)
  • 2nd level recycle bin seems to have problems 🙁
  • #sp2010 web parts have a new "AJAX Options" in the tool pane, u can enable "Asyncronous refresh" for each web part. Be careful w this!
  • SharePoint 2010 web part HTML is being loaded via AJAX,  this means no more annoying
    full page refreshes of each web part on a page, we can refresh them
    separately from each other!
  • The folder icon
    on side of a site is just waaayyy 2 cool, navigation from the current
    sub folders all the way up the site collection…dang!
  • Nice, #sharepoint 2010 explorer view won't let you drag into the root of the web! Love it!
  • Adding
    files via Explorer view will leave them checked out when required
    fields are present!  Users must check in and add the fields!

Update (10/26/2009)

  • Validation on Site/List/ListItem names – invalid characters are checked!
  • Access database to complete Site/List/ASPX pages via Access Services
  • You can modify the built in workflows using SharePoint Designer 2010
  • SPD Workflow can be tied to content types
  • SharePoint Designer can now use InfoPath forms for workflow forms (Init, Assoc, Task)
  • Visio diagrams can be linked to external data and refreshed on SharePoint Sites
  • "Hold" document in ANY library, not just Records Center
  • Document Sets allow execution of a single action against multiple documents (reduce repetitive work)
  • Social computing – Activity Streams
  • Visual Studio does token replace on Public Key Token Evidence in your files!
  • You can create your own services to host in SharePoint (although we aren't sure why you would want to do this!)
  • SP2010 adds new WebAdd and ListAdd event receivers
  • Async Remote PowerShell command interface is VERY cool
  • RBS allows you to implement real encryption in SharePoint!
  • Web services = OUT, REST/AJAX/JSON = IN (RIP Web Services 1999-2009)
  • You can have Basic Validation on List Columns (still no Regular Expression in SharePoint!)

While @SPConf (10/19/2009) – when NDA curtain dropped:

  • "Save site as template" now outputs a WSP which imports into VS 2010 as a new project!
  • Did u know when all svc r enabled, u will have 19 new databases in #sharepoint 2010? Yikes! Hire a great DBA!
  • New password expire notification n #sharepoint 2010 for svc accounts!
  • New #sharepoint organizationprofileservice.asmx can be used n ur own apps, not just the silverlight web part!
  • SSP goes away; rest based SVC. #SharePoint 2010 is 'cloud ready' This IS the future. All services impl as WCF – SOA baby!
  • You can convert ur taxonomy term store objects to json in #sharepoint w built n converters, default json max size is 5mb 
  • New WCF httphandler in #sharepoint 2010 #spc09 finally getting away from old web services
  • New Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll is great! Will help with a lot of advanced setups!
  • Reporting svcs is integrated into #sharepoint 2010, no add-in install, new MS charting controls r free and cool lookin : thank god!
  • U can recover content from old cdb backups using central admin!!!
  • U can now backup #sharepoint site collections, sites and lists from central admin…no stsadm/powershell!
  • SMS messaging can be setup for alerts, invites and notifications, gotta have service prov account
  • Content database timer jobs can be config to point to specific WFE servers to run…more web apps can be created now!
  • You can now setup a failover database server very easily for ur content databases in #sharepoint 2010
  • You can now pump log file data to a database server rather than just a "log" file…finally! 
  • New built in taxonomy features will make building ur information architecture so much easier in #sharepoint 2010!
  • You can now have multiple "send to" records center links in #sharepoint via central admin…YES!
  • New sandboxed applications will make sure bad apps don't take ur #sharepoint servers down! Bad developers! 😉

Updates (afternoon)

  • Workflows can be scoped to Site level, not just list level (and globally reused from designer)
  • Transacted deletes and other changes with lists (finally some level of transactions)!
  • Event handlers get post-synchronous events!
  • Client Object Model can batch commands to send to server (and supposedly from non-SP machines)
  • SharePoint Search will use phonetic and multi lingual comparisons to find your documents

More exciting stuff to come!

Chris