Chris Bortlik's Blog : Access

SharePoint as a Development Platform

cbortlik — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:54:40 GMT

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:

Static sites: HTML & JavaScript using tools like Notepad, FrontPage, DreamWeaver
Dynamic sites : C++, ISAPI extensions on IIS, Java
Wrapper applications: ASP
Frameworks: ASP.NET, AJAX
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:

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).
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.
Silverlight web parts shipping out of the box to enable you to quickly add rich Silverlight capabilities to your SharePoint site.
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.
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.

Office, SharePoint, Visio and Project 2010 News …

cbortlik — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:44:00 GMT

Today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, major announcements were made regarding Office, SharePoint, Project and Visio 2010.

Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. Starting today, tens of thousands of people will be invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program. Full details can be found in this press release.

Here are some additional resources that were made available today:

Office 2010 site: Get all of the news and see demos of the next version of Office.
Office 2010 Press Pass: Additional press releases and information on Office 2010.
SharePoint 2010 preview site: See some of what is coming in SharePoint 2010.
Worldwide Partner Conference site: Watch the keynotes and read other announcements.

Want to get Office Enterprise 2007 for $9.95?

cbortlik — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:30:28 GMT

We recently rolled out changes to the Microsoft Home Use Program (HUP) that may enable you to download Office Enterprise 2007 for your home personal use for just $9.95!

Details can be found on the Home Use site.

Not familiar with the Home Use Program? Home Use is just one of the many Software Assurance (SA) benefits that many of our customers enjoy.

In addition to getting upgrade rights to newer versions of Microsoft software, SA benefits also help with training and deploying Microsoft software.

Office 2010: Register for the Technical Preview Program and Get More Info …

cbortlik — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:48:35 GMT

Earlier this week Microsoft made some important Office 2010 announcements during our annual TechEd conference. One of the announcements was that Microsoft will have an invitation only Technical Preview Program for Office 2010.

This program is scheduled to launch in July 2009 and will offer selected customers the opportunity to experience early, pre-release versions of Office 2010 which will include the following applications: Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, Access 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Publisher 2010.

As we count down to the start of the Technical Preview Program for Office 2010, more information and resources on Office 2010 are becoming publicly available for our customers and partners. These include:

Office 2010 Technical Preview Registration: Register to be considered for the Technical Preview Program, which is scheduled to begin in July 2009.
Office 2010 IT Blog: The official Office 2010 blog of the Microsoft Office product group. This includes information on the preliminary system requirements for Office 2010.
Office 2010 Forum: A place to discuss the Office 2010 Technical Preview Program and other information and questions around the new version Office
Office 2010 the Movie: A fun trailer and preview of things to come.
Office 2010 Press Release: Some high level details on Office, SharePoint and Exchange 2010.

Office, SharePoint and Exchange 2007 – Better Together

cbortlik — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:48:00 GMT

One of the topics that I frequently present on at conferences is the Office system and why it is “better” to use the Office 2007 client with the 2007 versions of the SharePoint and Exchange server products.

The presentation that I use for most of these sessions is a summary of many of the key items discussed in the Office/SharePoint “better together” whitepaper. It also touches upon some of the areas discussed in this Exchange 2007 feature comparison for the Exchange server with different Outlook and Outlook Web Access clients.

Here are some of the highlights:

Enterprise Content Management: Content Management process integrated into the Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 clients. This helps increase the adoption and usage of your SharePoint site and integrates critical functionality such as workflow and document properties, including metadata that is used to drive SharePoint views and improve search results.
PowerPoint Slide Libraries: Publish slides for central storage, reuse and change notification. Slide libraries add a great amount of business value by making sure that key corporate messages, content and branding are being reused and kept in sync.
Excel Services: Publish spreadsheets for server hosting, web viewing and component access control. The Excel Services whitepaper and my recent Excel for Business Intelligence (BI) blog post have additional details.
Outlook / SharePoint Integration: Bi-directional sync of calendars, tasks, contacts, and discussion boards. Offline access to document libraries. The Outlook Exchange website has a great article that walks thru all of the details.
Outlook / Exchange 2007 Utilization: Unified communications, Managed folders, Scheduling enhancements and more. This article reviews these and other new Outlook 2007 capabilities in greater detail.
Electronic Forms: Publish e-forms for e-mail and browser based form completion. My InfoPath blog post provides more information on this and other ways to leverage InfoPath.
OneNote / SharePoint Integration: You can have OneNote automatically synchronize shared notebooks with SharePoint, which can then be searched and viewed by people with the appropriate permissions. More information on OneNote can be found in this blog post.
Groove / SharePoint Integration: Direct synchronization between Groove workspaces and SharePoint document libraries. This whitepaper demonstrates how you can use Groove to securely collaborate and extend SharePoint to customers and partners that are outside of your organization and those with the need for off-line functionality or access to content in low network bandwidth scenarios.
Access / SharePoint Integration: Host Access data on SharePoint sites, use either browser or Access client to work with data. This enables you to move Access data to SharePoint lists and also helps with querying and joining multiple SharePoint lists and other data sources. More details can be found here.