Chris Bortlik's Blog

Getting Started with SharePoint 2010

Since the beta for SharePoint 2010 was publicly released in November 2009 there has been a lot of interest and activity by our customers and partners testing and planning for SharePoint 2010. About 90% of my activities these days is directly related to working with customers and partners on SharePoint 2010.

Below are some of the main resources and links that I share with people. Hope these help. Please share others with me and I’ll update and maintain the list. Thanks!

P.S. For those of you in the Boston, MA area – I’ll see you soon at the SharePoint Saturday event on Saturday, February 27, 2010. Sessions will be offered there for end users, developers and IT pros.I’ll be leading a session there on SharePoint as a Development Platform.

General SharePoint 2010 Overview

1. SharePoint 2010 main Microsoft site – The primary starting point for finding all SharePoint 2010 information, videos, whitepapers and other resources.
2. SharePoint and Office 2010 whitepaper – Get all of the details on what features require the 2010 versions of Office and SharePoint.
3. SharePoint 2010 evaluation guides – These were given to all SharePoint Conference attendees in October 2009. Separate guides for SharePoint 2010 overview, IT pros and developers.
4. SharePoint Conference content – You can access all SharePoint Conference content and session replays online. Conference attendees already have access. Didn’t make it to Las Vegas for the event? No problem. You can also purchase access to the content at the site.
5. End user training – Point8020 has started publishing some SharePoint 2010 training videos.
6. Twitter – The #SP2010 hash tag is the primary one I follow for all news on SharePoint 2010. You can also follow me @cbortlik to get my regular updates and see who else I’m following.
7. Prior post – My post from last October provides many additional links to videos and press releases from when we publicly unveiled SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference.

IT Pros

In addition to the items above, IT pros may want to review and consider the following resources:

1. TechNet – Review the published SharePoint 2010 technical guidance and best practices. Some of the key areas to check out include server, database and client requirements; migration planning; and the new management capabilities.
2. SharePoint product team blog – Setup an RSS feed to keep up to date on the latest technical announcements from the SharePoint product team.
3. SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) – Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and our partners have been trained extensively in SharePoint 2010 and have offerings to help you with the planning and upgrading to SharePoint 2010.
4. Get the SharePoint 2010 beta bits! To do so, you have a few options:
• Build your own environment: You can download SharePoint 2010 beta and use these instructions to setup and configure SharePoint 2010. I’ve also found this blog post from Ron Bokleman to be very helpful as well.
• Use a prebuilt environment: You can download a fully built SharePoint 2010 beta test environment which is a set of Virtual Hard Drives (VHD) that can be used with Hyper-V.

Developers

Developers may also want to check out the following:

1. MSDN – Tons of SharePoint 2010 developer information and guidance is available on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) site.
2. Channel 9 – A number of introductory SharePoint 2010 developer resources and training modules can now be freely accessed from Channel 9 on MSDN.
3. Critical Path Training – Critical Path Training (CPT) is offering training now for SharePoint 2010 developers. CPT trains Microsoft and our partners and is now able to train our customers as well.
4. CodePlex – SharePoint 2010 development projects are already being created and published by the SharePoint community as well Microsoft and our partners.

Best of SharePoint Conference Slides Posted

Thanks again to the 200+ customers that joined Microsoft and our partners at the Northeast Best of SharePoint Conference which was held in our Waltham, MA office on Monday, February 1.

As promised, all slides presented have been posted on SkyDrive.

I am looking forward to seeing many of you again soon and at the SharePoint Saturday Boston event on Saturday, February 27 in Waltham, MA.

Microsoft Business Integration Road Show

One of the topics that I speak frequently about is using SharePoint as an application development platform. Often building solutions on top of SharePoint requires integration with external systems, people, data and processes.

Microsoft is running a series of events targeted at Enterprise Architects and others that are working with SharePoint and business process automation.

At this event, you will learn:

• About the price/performance advantage of Microsoft’s Application Platform to drive your integration, SOA and composite application projects
• How BizTalk Server enables various B2B scenarios across industry domains like Manufacturing, Healthcare and Financial Services
• How the Microsoft Application Platform can help keep data in sync across your mainframe and ERP based systems and connect with SharePoint to provide an integrated end-user view

Session abstracts, event locations and registration information can be found here. The Boston, MA event will be held on Thursday, January 21.

My First Prediction for the New Year: Why Access Services Will Be a Big Hit in 2010

As we prepare to close out 2009 it is normal for people to start looking forward and make predictions about things in 2010. Here at Microsoft, 2010 will be another huge release year for us with new versions of SharePoint, Office, Visio and Project scheduled to be released in the first half of 2010.

While there are many things to be excited about in the 2010 release, one area that I see tremendous value for both business and IT folks is the release of Access Services as a server side capability within SharePoint 2010.

Many of you know that my background includes having spent about 14 years as a customer working at large and small companies as an IT architect, developer, director and various other roles. During that time I constantly had a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Access.

Since it is so easy for people to create, copy and share Access databases, the tool took off and spread like wild fire. This is a mixed blessing and double edged sword. On the plus side, most Access solutions are not built by traditional developers which is great at addressing some applications that the IT team does not have resources available to work on or they would be too expensive to build from scratch. A negative to this approach though is the number of different Access databases that have popped up and how challenging it can be for IT to manage, track and secure all of these mini applications.

From an end user perspective, Access continues to be a great tool for Rapid Application Development (RAD). With minimal training and effort, a non developer can quickly build sophisticated solutions using Access that join data from multiple data sources (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint lists, Excel workbooks, flat files, etc.) and that data can be mashed up into nice reports, queries and data entry forms.

From an IT perspective, this power comes with some interesting challenges. For example, Access was never designed to support a large number of concurrent users (i.e. multiple people working in the same database at the same time). There is also the challenge of Access database sprawl, security and compliance. Then there are also the concerns around support, maintenance and upgrades – especially over the years when the original “developers” of the Access solution move into new roles (inside or outside of the company) and the business is now being run on this Access application.

SharePoint and Access 2007 took some small steps in the right direction to addressing some of these concerns. For example, you can now move Access database content to SharePoint 2007 lists and have the data stored inside of SharePoint where it can be properly managed, secured, backed up and audited. End users can take this data offline with the Access client and continue to perform reporting and querying against this data and other data coming from outside of SharePoint. This was a good start.

SharePoint and Access 2010 make huge improvements in areas such as the following:

1. SharePoint 2010 lists have been beefed up to scale to 50 million items in a single list and have added governance and throttling controls to make sure IT can manage how large lists can get, how many items should be in a view, etc. In short, it allows you to have large amounts of data stored in SharePoint while making sure that an end user does not bring the server to its knees by doing something they shouldn’t.
2. SharePoint 2010 lists now add relational database concepts such as enforcing unique constraints (make sure duplicate rows are not inserted), adding relationships between lists (don’t delete a record from a child list if a related record is on the parent list or delete records from the child list when it’s parent record is deleted) and adding validations (field length must be greater than x number of characters).
3. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010 allows you to centrally create and manage read/write connections to external databases, including CRM, ERP and other Line of Business (LOB) systems. The great thing about BCS connections is that once the connection is created, it can be reused by other SharePoint and Office client applications without every person needing to know the database server name, database instance name and user ID and password required to connect to the data source. In some ways, you can think of a BCS connection as a server side ODBC connection on steroids. :-)
4. Access Services allows you to take advantage of these major list and BCS improvements in SharePoint 2010 to publish Access applications (not just data) from Access 2010 which now run inside of a web browser (including Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari).
5. Standard Access features like reports, queries, datasheets and macros can be published to SharePoint 2010 and run in the browser with no additional client applications installed. This is not just a read only view – the data can be updated and maintained as well via the browser. Access reports that run in the browser are built on top of SQL Server reporting services and support the ability to export to Word, Excel and PDF formats from within the browser.
6. The rich Access client application can still be used to manage and publish changes to the Access application and serves as the offline client for cases where you want to take the data offline and work with it. When you reconnect, Access will synchronize and merge your changes with other changes done server side including helping to deal with conflict resolution when multiple people update the same record at the same time.
7. UI and data macros in Access 2010 enable you to develop a single application that can run both as a local rich client application and a browser based server side application. The macros are created in Access 2010 using a new macro designer that includes Intellisense. The macros are both created and managed as XML. Many of these macros create SharePoint workflows under the covers to build upon that platform and perform similar to database triggers.
8. Access Services adds additional client and server caching capabilities on top of what SharePoint 2010 offers to add even greater scalability for these applications – above and beyond what a standard SharePoint list could provide. Only the changes (deltas) are synchronized between the client and server when you work with an offline copy of the Access web database.
9. Access Services are just one example of how SharePoint 2010 enables the usage of Composite applications (aka mash-ups) that can be quickly created and deployed while still enabling the proper level of support, governance, security, auditing, retention policies and management.
10. While Access Services is a great next step there are still some limitations to what you can run as an Access web database in SharePoint versus what can be done in a local Access database. Access 2010 includes a built in compatibility checker that is used at design time to ensure cross platform support before deployment. There are also different Access database formats supported in the 2010 release to enable backwards compatibility with prior Access client applications.

Still looking for more information on Access Services, including a demo and how to test this out yourself? Check out the related blog posts on the Access team's blog.

Best of SharePoint Conference Coming to Waltham, MA in February 2010!

Couldn’t make it to Vegas this year? Best of SharePoint Conference Comes to You!

This event is being offered in February 2010 exclusively for Microsoft Northeast region enterprise customers. Details are below. Please contact me or your Microsoft Account Manager for more information on how to register.

• Keynote & Office/SharePoint 2010 Overview - Presented by a Microsoft Senior Product Manager
• Best Rated Content from the National SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas - Featuring 4 presenters from the original SharePoint Conference
• Breakout sessions will include:
• Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010
• Enterprise Search 2010 Overview: SharePoint and FAST
• Introduction to SharePoint Applications using InfoPath and Forms Services 2010
• Introducing PowerPivot (aka Project "Gemini") - The New Self-Service Business Intelligence You've Been Waiting For
• ECM for the Masses - How SharePoint 2010 delivers on the promise
• Customer and partner panel discussion - Using SharePoint 2007 for Internet, Extranet and Intranet Services
• SharePoint 2010 Hands On Labs for the IT Pro and Developer - Provided by Critical Path Training and led by a SharePoint MVP
• Business Productivity Immersion Labs - Experience collaboration solutions through the eyes, ears and fingertips of your end users
• Microsoft Valued Partner Reception - Have a look at local partner solutions for leveraging and enhancing your SharePoint investment…and a chance to win some great prizes!

Upcoming SharePoint 2010 Events in December for Microsoft Northeast Enterprise Customers

Over the next 2+ weeks I will be involved with sessions on SharePoint 2010 at numerous events in the Northeast area:

1. Wednesday, December 2 at the Gilbane Conference Boston event: Helping out the SharePoint product team in the “The SharePoint 2010 Experience” hands on labs.
2. Tuesday, December 8 at the Beyond Tech-Ed event in Rochester, NY – Presenting and doing tons of demos in the “SharePoint 2010: What’s Coming Next and When” session.
3. Wednesday, December 9 at the Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform event in Rochester, NY – Presenting the keynote and “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” talks.
4. Thursday, December 10 at the Beyond Tech-Ed event in Hartford, CT – Presenting and doing tons of demos in the “SharePoint 2010: What’s Coming Next and When” session.
5. Tuesday, December 15 at the Beyond Tech-Ed event in Waltham, MA – Presenting and doing tons of demos in the “SharePoint 2010: What’s Coming Next and When” session.

Hope to see you all at these events!

Content Posted from the “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” Event

Todd Mancini has posted the presentations from our “Realizing SharePoint as a Development Platform” event here on his blog. Please stop by Todd’s blog to check these slides out. If you’re going to be in Rochester, NY on December 9 please register and attend the event there.

Public Beta Released for SharePoint, Office, Visio and Project 2010

Today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced the release of the public beta of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010, and Office Web Apps for business customers. 

You can now download the beta at www.microsoft.com/2010

More details on what is available in SharePoint 2010 can be found here in my prior blog post.

SharePoint and Office 2010 Developer Training Courses on Channel 9

Yesterday, Channel 9 launched two new training courses for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 created by developers for developers.  Channel 9 has always been about giving direct access to the engineers and future technologies from Microsoft, and now we’re extending this successful formula to bring you training that will allow developers to get started on learning about emerging technologies at their own pace.  Today you’ll find extensive instructor recordings from top MVPs on how to develop against both SharePoint and Office 2010. We’ll also be publishing more content at the beginning of December that will include hands-on labs, source code, and much more! All of this free for you to consume or download at your own pace.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Training

See how SharePoint 2010 has evolved into a first-class developer platform. Also, learn how SharePoint 2010 provides the business collaboration platform for developers to rapidly build solutions using familiar tools such as Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 through this self-paced course.

Office 2010 Developer Training

Discover how Office 2010 Beta is a broadly extensible platform for building information worker productivity solutions and see how developing for Office with Visual Studio 2010 makes this easy. See online presentations with demos that will help you get started developing solutions from Add-ins to full featured Office Business Applications (OBAs) using Visual Studio 2010 with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as the core platform.

We hope you enjoy this initial set of training videos and will check back with Channel 9 in the near future as we build the learning center out to support SharePoint and Office 2010 development.

SharePoint as a Development Platform

While preparing to present my 2 sessions at the “Maximize Your SharePoint Investment: Leverage It as a Development Platform!” events that we’re doing for Northeast enterprise customers in Waltham, MA (November 19) and Rochester, NY (December 9) I continue to be amazed at how rich and robust SharePoint is for configuring and developing custom solutions.

I’ve been involved in architecting and developing browser based applications for well over 10 years – both on Microsoft and other technologies. My technical evolution over the years has been consistent with what many others have experienced:

1. Static sites: HTML & JavaScript using tools like Notepad, FrontPage, DreamWeaver

2. Dynamic sites : C++, ISAPI extensions on IIS, Java

3. Wrapper applications: ASP

4. Frameworks: ASP.NET, AJAX

5. Platform: SharePoint

As with previous evolutions, using SharePoint as an application platform enables you to get out of the business of writing plumbing functions and focus on building applications that add unique value to your business. For example, why should you spend time writing workflows from scratch or building forms based solutions when SharePoint has out of the box capabilities and tools to automate most of that? Why should you write complex web controls, search, business intelligence and sites when SharePoint has so many out of the box site templates, features and web parts that you can configure and extend?

SharePoint provides a great layer of abstraction, services and functionality on top of ASP.NET This helps you accelerate your development cycles, lower project risk, reduce costs and get to market faster.

I’m very excited about many things that are coming in SharePoint 2010 to further improve the development experience on the SharePoint platform. In future blog posts I’ll dive into these areas deeper. However, if I’m pressed to outline my top 5 items in these areas they would be:

1. Development on a non server environment. In SharePoint 2010, you can now develop on 64-bit client machines that are running Windows 7 or Vista SP1 (or later).
2. SharePoint as a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. Great improvements here that any ASP.NET developer would love including, integrated debugging, visual designers, project/control templates, WSP deployment/packaging and tracing. There is also rich integrated Application Lifecycle Management through Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.
3. Silverlight web parts shipping out of the box to enable you to quickly add rich Silverlight capabilities to your SharePoint site.
4. Composite applications that include round tripping, packaging and distribution of tasks between business analysts, power users and developers. Significant improvements such as Visio 2010 for designing workflows; SharePoint Designer improvements (including exporting to reusable WSP packages); Access Services; InfoPath Forms Services; Word Services; Visio Services; PerformancePoint Services; and Excel Services.
5. Business Connectivity Services for creating reusable read/write data connections to external data sources (e.g. Active Directory, ERP, CRM, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) that can be exposed and used across SharePoint and the Office clients, including off-line usage via SharePoint Workspace.

There is so much more that we’ll get into at the local events and in future blog posts. For now, I encourage you to check out some of the links and resources highlighted in my earlier SharePoint 2010 blog post.

“Learning Snacks” for SharePoint 2010 Now Available

Want to quickly learn about SharePoint 2010 products in preparation of the new Beta release? Try these new “Learning Snacks”; bite-sized online readiness courses provided by Microsoft Learning, on the following subjects:

Developing Solutions with Microsoft SharePoint 2010
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 enables developers to build rich solutions easily, rapidly, and efficiently. This Learning Snack demonstrates how you can use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to create and deploy your solutions. It also demonstrates how you can build Silverlight applications using the SharePoint 2010 client object model and use LINQ to SharePoint to create SharePoint entities

Experiencing the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 User Interface

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 includes an enhanced user interface that provides IT professionals with a streamlined administration experience. This Learning Snack describes the features of the SharePoint 2010 user interface. It demonstrates how the new Central Administration console enables you to perform several administrative tasks from one central location. The Learning Snack also describes how Shared Application Architecture can be used for flexible deployments in SharePoint 2010

Managing and Troubleshooting with Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 facilitates administration by providing several tools that help IT professionals efficiently manage data and troubleshoot any issues. This Learning Snack describes the Large List Resource Throttling feature, which helps you manage large lists. It demonstrates how a SQL Server logging database can be used to log SharePoint events. The Learning Snack also demonstrates how the SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer can be used to detect and automatically fix common issues

TechNet Webcast Series: SharePoint Internet Business

SharePoint 2010 Announcements at the SharePoint Conference Today

What a day here in Las Vegas! Earlier today we publicly unveiled SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference (SPC). There is such a positive energy, buzz and excitement from the 7,000+ customer and partner attendees.

Today’s events included the announcement that both SharePoint and Office 2010 will enter the public beta phase in November.

Not here at the SharePoint Conference this week and looking for more information? Check out the resources below:

1. SharePoint team blog: Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Server, has a great post describing all of the key capabilities related to SharePoint 2010.
2. SharePoint 2010 official site: This is the place to get all of the news, reviews and see demos on SharePoint 2010. You can also sign up to be notified when the public beta is available in November.
3. SharePoint 2010 forum: Great site to get answers to SharePoint 2010 questions.
4. SharePoint 2010 PressPass: View the SPC 2009 keynote video, a Q&A with Jeff Teper, and more.
5. SharePoint 2010 Developer Center: Early information on the SharePoint 2010 developer platform and resources have been released on MSDN.
6. http://www.mssharepointitpro.com: IT Pro information and resources.
7. http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint: Additional SharePoint information on the official SharePoint site.

Now that SharePoint 2010 has gone public, I’ll be blogging and sharing more information.

What aspects of SharePoint 2010 are you most looking forward to? What are you looking for more information on?

SharePoint Consulting and Training Resources

Over the past few months I have been meeting and working with customers to help them with Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and to plan for SharePoint 2010. Our discussion usually starts with generic questions such as:

• How do we architect and setup our SharePoint environment?
• What features should we turn on and what’s the impact of doing so?
• How do we move content from one environment to another?
• What are the best practices for governance, security and information architecture?
• How much disk space do we need and what should we think about when planning for search and content databases?
• What about backups?
• How do we train our end users?

While there are some quick answers to these questions, most of the time there is much more to think about than just the surface level questions. Discussions that go well beyond a quick conversation.

In some ways getting started with SharePoint is a lot like building a new house for the first time. Just like how you would never build a house without having detailed architectural blue prints and plans, and involving subject matter experts (plumbers, electricians, etc.) to help with the construction, so too should you consider engaging certified SharePoint partners to help with the detailed architectural design, training and implementation.

What many customers do not realize is that there are often a number of free benefits and services available to them that are designed to assist with the up front planning. These include:

1. Packaged services consulting benefits: Prepaid consulting days that many customers have available to them based on their contract with Microsoft. Key ones to note for SharePoint:
• SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) is designed to help your organization plan an effective deployment that can optimize the core capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
• Business Value Planning Services (BVPS) helps your organization's business decision makers develop a plan to maximize the business value of the Microsoft Office system through structured, multi-day engagements.
2. There are also a number of different IT and end user training resources available. Most of these are at no additional charge as well:
• Training vouchers can be used to attend training classes with Microsoft certified training partners.
• E-Learning courses can be used for self paced training.
• The Productivity Hub can be downloaded, installed and customized in your SharePoint environment to both provide training resources and showcase key SharePoint capabilities.

One final note: many of the resources above are provided to Microsoft customers that have Software Assurance (SA) for SharePoint. If you don’t currently have SA for SharePoint, now may be a good time to get the above resources as well as the rights to use SharePoint 2007 now and SharePoint 2010 after it is launched next year.

See you at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas!

It’s hard to believe, but the SharePoint Conference is less than 7 weeks away! The conference is being held in Las Vegas from October 19-22. This will be THE place to hear and see all about SharePoint 2010.

I will be attending the SharePoint Conference and will be involved in a few things, including:

1. Presenting a session titled: “Office 2007 vs. Office 2010 - Deployment Considerations”
2. Proctoring hands on labs where you can use SharePoint 2010

The hands on labs are self explanatory. This will be your time to take a guided tour of all things SharePoint 2010 and be able to use the latest bits.

My presentation, at first glance, may seem a little odd. Why, at the SharePoint Conference of all places, are we talking about Office?

The answer: in the 2007 product release, the Office client lights up many of the key SharePoint capabilities and helps drive end user usage and adoption. More details on that can be found here in my prior blog post. In the 2010 release, we will build upon and extend this integration.

This session will dive into the pros and cons of Office 2007 and Office 2010 deployment and discuss how deploying Office 2007 now can help pave the way for Office 2010 in the future. Specific areas of focus will include the Open XML file formats; Office Business Applications; user interface changes and adoption; application virtualization; and integration of the Office client with SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server (OCS).

Are you planning to be at the SharePoint Conference as well? If so, what sessions and topics are you most interested to learn about?