Arpan Shah's Blog

SharePoint 2010 Platform Differentiation

There are many vendors that claim to have an enterprise collaboration platform. So what differentiates SharePoint? Each vendor can defend their features, their interoperability investments and developer stack. So instead of focusing on specific features, I wanted to lay out what I think are three broad areas of differentiation for SharePoint vs. any other vendor platform out there:

1. Real Choice: Anywhere, Anytime, Anyhow
To some it may seem surprising, but SharePoint offers more choice to users & customers than any other vendor out there.

- End Users can choose to access and interact with SharePoint with a rich client like Office (my personal favorite in 2010 is SharePoint Workspace), browser technology of their choice (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari) or any mobile device. With unparalleled Office integration and cross-browser support, other platform vendors don’t even come close here. Many choose to offer their application only in the browser; with SharePoint, you get it all. Not only can you access SharePoint through the device of your choice, but the SharePoint 2010 User Experience is candy. With its wiki-like editing capabilities, it’s really easy to interact with. AJAX and Silverlight make interaction very smooth and seamless. Our investment with MUI also enables people to interact with SharePoint in their preferred language!

- Organizations also have choice. They can scale up or scale down their deployments; install services on the same server or on to different servers; they can choose to use Virtualization technology or install on the metal. And most recently, Microsoft offered the choice to organizations to install on-premises and choose to subscribe to a service in the cloud with SharePoint Online. With the SharePoint 2010 wave, SharePoint Online is close to parity from an end-user feature perspective when compared to SharePoint On-Premises.

- Data in SharePoint; Data outside of SharePoint. You pick. And that “you” isn’t just the IT department; that “you” can be an end user. SharePoint offers a number of ways to integrate with Line of Business data through standards support and investments like Business Connectivity Services (BCS, read/write capability) and tools like SharePoint Designer & Visual Studio. You can rather easily surface data in SharePoint; in fact, there are many whitepapers we’ve published and other vendors have published to show how this can be  done. You can even take your business & SharePoint data with you offline with SharePoint Workspace.

Across all fronts, SharePoint 2010 will provide even more choice which is a win for our customers and partners.

2. Real Unified Platform
Loosely coupled components don’t make a platform. Some vendors package and market their functionality as one platform, but in reality they have siloed technology that must be glued together. While the tagline “6 servers in 1” is sometimes used to describe SharePoint, it’s misleading. SharePoint is “1 server” which has a set of integrated features. This has multiple benefits: 1) cross-workload functionality that can be leveraged to create compelling solutions and 2) costs can be cut with one platform that end users have to be trained on, that developers have to develop on and IT has to manage.

In the 2010 release, we’ve heavily invested in providing a great experience for IT to manage SharePoint as a mission-critical enterprise platform. From deployment, to patching, to management, to upgrade, we’ve done a lot of work. Furthermore, SharePoint 2010 provides a scalable infrastructure to store terabytes of content and millions of items in a single list. Along with scale, we also include governance controls for IT.

3. Spectrum of Empowerment. Welcome to Composites.  
Many vendors provide developer extensibility but SharePoint is unique in that it empowers all users from end-users to power users to professional developers to create solutions. With SharePoint, you don’t have to write code to develop solutions. SharePoint offers users the ability to create no-code solutions using the browser and SharePoint Designer (a free download for SharePoint customers). In fact, with SharePoint 2010, we have a workload dedicated to this category of solutions – Composites. Composites includes applications like mash-ups, forms/workflow, data tracking, data analysis and more! Brand new features like Access Services, improved InfoPath forms integration, improved Excel services, improved workflow, business connectivity services, better browser and SPD functionality (just to name a few), enable SharePoint users to create engaging and powerful solutions.

For professional developers, SharePoint builds on the .NET platform and offers fantastic tooling with Visual Studio 2010, features like Business Connectivity Services, RESTful APIs, Silverlight support, Client OM and much more. On top of all of this, the nice thing with SharePoint 2010 is that many of these things are possible not only with SharePoint on-premises but with SharePoint Online too.

Of course, with great power comes responsibility and investments we’ve made with governance and Sandboxed Solutions help IT allow for secure & safe custom code deployment.

SharePoint 2010 Channel 9 Interviews

I wanted to share recent Channel 9 interviews that Tom Rizzo & I did during SharePoint Conference week. Enjoy!

Here’s my interview. In this interview, Kirk Evans & I discuss web content management and using SharePoint 2010 for public facing internet sites. We even touch upon Azure and talk about some of the news during SharePoint Conference week.(Just click play)

Here’s Tom’s interview. Tom & Kirk Evans discuss some of the SharePoint Conference announcements, developer tools, options for hosting on premise or in the cloud as well as the SharePoint 2010/.NET 4 roadmap.

SharePoint 2010 Overview Presentation

Here’s a pointer to the SharePoint Overview session presentation that I delivered at the SharePoint Conference this week. For those of you who missed it, I believe we’re publishing this session out publicly; I’ll be sure to point to it when it’s available.

In the mean time, take a look at the deck. Keep in mind that all the screenshots are from a pre-beta build.

SharePoint Conference Keynotes

If you didn’t get a chance to come to the SharePoint Conference and watch the keynotes, you can watch them now!

Steve Ballmer kicked off the conference with a dynamic keynote:

Followed by Jeff Teper:

(I do a demo to highlight IT platform investments at 1:05)

Welcome to SharePoint 2010

The moment has come that many of you have been waiting for – full disclosure of SharePoint 2010! Truth be told, many of us in Redmond have been anxiously waiting for this day, because now we can talk freely about SharePoint 2010 to our customers and partners.

There’s a lot of exciting news being announced today and a lot of great content will go live in a number of places. Keep in mind that while we are unveiling SharePoint 2010 today, the public beta won’t be available until next month. To get ready for that, I recommend checking out the following places for SharePoint 2010 news, information and content:

Top SharePoint 2010 Resources

- http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint. Check out Jeff Teper’s final installment of SharePoint 2010 where he describes many of the features that make up this release.

- http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx. Demo videos, feature descriptions, pre-beta evaluation guides.

- http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com. The place for developers to get started with SharePoint 2010.

- http://www.mssharepointitpro.com. The place for IT Professionals to get started with SharePoint 2010.

- http://www.mssharepointforums.com. The place to ask the Microsoft and SharePoint community questions.

Now the part that I’ve been personally waiting for.

My Top 12 Favorite Investments of SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 is the biggest release of SharePoint… ever. So trying to numerate all the features is an exercise in futility. The pre-beta evaluation guide highlights some of the top features if you’re looking for a longer list. Here are my personal favorite SharePoint 2010 investment areas in no particular order:

User Experience
Wow. SharePoint 2010 ships with a modern User Interface that is cross-browser compatible, smooth and interactive. By using AJAX and Silverlight, it really makes it easy to work with. The hero features that really makes the user experience intuitive for end-users is the Ribbon. With the Ribbon, users can easily add, modify and interact with content in SharePoint. It’s candy. Another hidden gem is our investment in a true multi-lingual user interface. Once you have the language packs installed and you set the appropriate languages on the sites, end users will be able to interact with SharePoint in the language of their choice. Last but not least, I’m excited about the investments we’ve made for mobile devices.

Social Platform
Rich My Sites with activity feeds, colleague tracking and ratings, tagging to taxonomy and noteboards on list items are just a few of the investments we’ve made here. Improved blogs, enterprise wikis and the ability to surface all this rich content through metadata navigation, tag clouds and search really make the SharePoint social investments stand out. It’s not just about siloed social investments; what makes this set of investments killer is the fact that it’s integrated with the rest of the platform.

Web Content Management
With SharePoint 2010, it’s really easy to create and manage web pages. The Ribbon makes it intuitive, features likes one-click page creation and the ability to swap page-layouts very easily improve web content management productivity. Of course, features like ratings and tagging apply to web pages. Of course, we support WCAG 2.0 AA and allow users to comply with XHTML standards.

Digital Asset Management
SharePoint 2010 introduces a rich set of rich media investments. :-) We enable you to stream videos right from SharePoint with our investments in bit-throttling. Our Asset libraries also give a nice User Interface to navigate through and interact with rich media.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
Wow. In many ways, I personally think this is one of the “sleeper” killer features of SharePoint 2010. BCS takes the BDC in SharePoint 2007 to another level with the introduction of read/write capability, tools to create external entities and client integration. Entities can easily be created in SharePoint Designer to connect to SQL and other LOB systems. Once an entity is created, this data can be exposed in SharePoint in the form of external lists (a new type of list in SharePoint 2010) as well Office client applications like Outlook for a read/write experience. SharePoint Workspace can also take these external lists offline.

Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint.
This is something developers have asked for and we listened and delivered in this version. With the SharePoint 2010 release, developers can develop with Visual Studio 2010 the same way they would develop any other ASP.NET application. We will ship more than a dozen project templates to help developers accelerate development; one of my favorite templates is the Visual Web Part template. The name says it all. :-) Developers can now have an F5 experience and easily debug and deploy their code. We have also made investments to support Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to help you with team source control and building software. I almost forgot to mention that developers can develop on 64-bit Vista and Windows 7. :-)

Developer Platform
Above and beyond the tools, we’ve done a number of things to make SharePoint a great developer platform. Support for BCS, REST and LINQ are just a few examples. The developer dashboard allows developers to test their code in-context to make sure it runs the way you want; effectively, it provides a stack-trace of your application. The remote client OM allows developers to write code that interacts with SharePoint that doesn’t run in the same box. This is super helpful for Silverlight/SharePoint development. These are just a a few of the examples that make SharePoint a great developer platform.

IT Pro Investments.
SharePoint 2010 ships with a number of tools to help IT Professionals manage large SharePoint deployments. Windows PowerShell support, health analyzers, reporting and a streamlined Central Admin are a just a few examples. The investment in large lists and giving IT the ability to govern how content & applications are accessed and loaded are equally important. For example, with SharePoint 2010, we support million+ list items in a single list. To help IT govern how those items are accessed, we’ve introduced resource throttling for IT to be able to limit the number of items accessed in a view, for example. Another area of investment is flexible upgrade and deployment. Our aim is to make upgrade a smooth and predictable experience. In that respect, features like Visual Upgrade and Upgrade Checker have been introduced.

Power User Power
Many of you probably noticed that we introduced a new workload called “Composites”. “Composites” represents all the no-code solutions that can be composed on the SharePoint platform by taking advantage of all the integrated set of capabilities we provide. Improved InfoPath Forms, BCS, Out-of-the-box Web Parts, Workflow are just a few examples of the capabilities that help Power Users create custom solutions. Some other really powerful new capabilities in SharePoint 2010 include Visio Services and Access Services. As their names imply, these capabilities allow users to publish Access and Visio applications to SharePoint that can then accessed by other users through a browser. Very powerful stuff! Along with all the platform capabilities, we’ve invested in a number of tools including SharePoint Designer (which is free for all SharePoint customers) as well as the browser itself to help users create solutions easily. For example, users will be able to create new sites and mash-ups much more easily in the browser.

Sandboxed Solutions 
Sandboxed solutions allow organizations to safely allow site administrators to upload custom code. This code runs in its own “sandbox” and cannot impact other sites. Solutions can also be given a certain number of resources to restrict it from taking up too many resources. Sandboxed solutions are also limited to partially trusted code and have access to a more limited set of APIs than full trust solutions.

SharePoint Online/Multi-tenancy
One of the big investment areas across the board with SharePoint 2010 is the investment in hosting and multi-tenancy. Because of this investment, we will have a very high degree of consistency between what end user features we offer with SharePoint 2010 on-premises and the 2010 wave of SharePoint Online technology. For example, Enterprise CAL features like InfoPath Forms Services and Excel Services  that are absent today in the SharePoint 2007 online version will be present in the 2010 wave. Not only that, but the customization and extensibility experience for SharePoint Online will be greatly enhanced in the 2010 wave with our investments in Sandboxed Solutions and Power User features and tools.

Office 2010 Integration
I wrote a rather detailed post of my top Office 2010 features that you should check out for more detail. To summarize, some of the new integration features that excite me are SharePoint Workspace, SharePoint integration w/ Backstage (tagging, noteboard, etc), Office Web Applications hosted on SharePoint, PowerPoint Broadcasting w/ SharePoint and BCS integration with Word.

Here’s a pointer to the deck I presented at the SharePoint Conference this week.

Windows Azure Poker Probability Calculator Application

Over the last few weeks, I found some free time to play around with Windows Azure. Since PDC 2008, I’ve wanted to get hands on with Windows Azure to become even more knowledgeable and gain experience with Microsoft’s cloud stack.

Here you have it: My Windows Azure application at http://holdem.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx. For those of you familiar with poker, you’ll hopefully enjoy it. It provides useful data on various poker scenarios. It’s really useful for anyone who plays poker.

Developing for Windows Azure was really straightforward. All I did was download the Windows Azure Developer Tools and SDK on my Windows 7 machine where I had Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition installed. Development was no different than developing a standard ASP.NET application. The Azure tools simulate a local environment so I can test it easily. After developing and testing on my local box, I published the application at http://www.azure.com. I’m using my PDC 2008 CTP account with 2 web roles.

I spent most of my time on the actual algorithm to make it really fast and accurate. The Azure environment lends itself to applications that scale out. Because I can’t scale up the processor, and the environment ran slower than my local machine, I had to re-think the algorithm to take advantage of Azure computing. It was a fun exercise, and I’m happy with the results! The beauty of Windows Azure is I don’t have to manage the server, worry about it going down, I can scale out easily, etc. I just had to write code. I encourage you to play with Windows Azure as well when you find some free time.

Check it out for yourself! I know the UI isn’t great since I didn’t spend any time on it; I was more focused on the business logic. I hope to find some free time after a few months to develop a slick Silverlight UI to make this really interactive.

SharePoint 2010 Training for SharePoint 2007 Partners

A lot of people have asked about SharePoint 2010 Training. Well now, it’s here! We’re announcing SharePoint Ignite which is SharePoint 2010 training for SharePoint 2007 Partners. Check out all the details and pre-requisites at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/topics/Pages/IgniteProgram4.aspx.

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek Presentation

While Tom, Richard and Paul did the Overview, IT Pro & Developer SharePoint 2010 sneak peek videos respectively on the web, I did the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek session at WPC last month. The video was recently posted that you can check out here.

My Top Office 2010 Tech Preview Features

When Office 2007 came out, I was one of the earliest adopters. I had the privilege of being one of the few people to demo and talk about Office 2007 to customers, partners and reviewers in the Beta 1 timeframe. As an Information Worker myself, I was hooked at Beta 1. The new user experience made Office 2007 a pleasure to work with. My favorite feature in the 2007 client, outside the UX, was SmartArt. I still use SmartArt almost every day I open Office. It’s really a killer feature.

And now I’m using Office 2010 Tech Preview. The new user experience is even more refined and now spans more client technologies and server technologies like SharePoint. And for SharePoint, the new ribbon is game changing. Not just for authoring, but just making people more productive in just about anything they do. It’s a paradigm shift for web applications, and I’m really looking forward to using it more.

Now back to the client. I want to share my personal favorite 10 Office 2010 client features. To be clear, these are my personal end user favorite features; there are more than 10, but these are top of mind for me right now. They are not in any particular order and all of them are focused on the core client applications. I’m also deliberately not including SharePoint 2010 features like the Ribbon, client integration, Business Connectivity Services, etc. I’ll save those for public beta when we are able to talk to about it more broadly.

I’m also interested in hearing what your favorite Office 2010 features are. Leave me a comment or twitter me @arpanshah.

1. Office Web Applications

Office Web Applications really allow me to use Office anywhere. I’m a beta user internally and it’s great! I can now have a consistent & high-fidelity experience with the browser of my choice, mobile device and the Office client. Beyond the actual experience, the other advantage of Office Web Applications over a service like Google Docs/Spreadsheets is that not only will consumers be able to use this on Windows Live, but Enterprises can deploy Office Web Applications on their own SharePoint servers for more control & governance – and of course, gain all the benefits that come with SharePoint.

2. Screen clippings

I absolutely love this! Right from Office 2010, I can insert screenshots of applications I have open right from Office with one click like I’ve done here:

This new feature also allows you to take a screen clipping.

For the rest of the blog post, I’m using this feature for all my screenshots.

3. Image Background Removal

One of the other useful features is the ability to remove an image background right within Office. It’s especially helpful with images that come with a white background. When your PPTX background isn’t white, these pictures are unusable. In the past, I had to use other applications to make the background transparent – now I can do it right within an application like PowerPoint 2010. Below, you can see a magnifying glass with a white background that PowerPoint 2010 has identified (the purple region). This bit of functionality comes from work that Microsoft Research has done.

4. Outlook User Experience

The Fluent UI in Outlook 2010 is really convenient. There are intuitive tabs and the number of clicks to action has reduced across the board.

There are many other UX enhancements throughout Outlook 2010. For example, when I receive meeting requests, I can see my other scheduled appointments inline. You also have tips throughout Outlook 2010 that tell you if you’re above your quota, you’re going to send an email outside your organization, etc.

 5. Video editing

In PowerPoint 2010, you can now easily insert and edit video. It’s a really useful feature at work when you’re creating and delivering presentations, but also at home if you want to quickly create albums with pictures and videos for birthdays, anniversaries, wedding receptions, etc.

Not only can videos be inserted, but they can easily be modified. I can trim the video, set the image cover for the video, add borders, add other effects like reflection as well as other special effects. Above, you can see that I added Richard Riley’s SharePoint 2010 IT Pro Sneak Peek video to a presentation I was delivering.

Needless to say, PPTX files can really bloat when you add images and videos. After trimming the video right within PowerPoint 2010, I can compress the media size to improve performance and reduce the size of the file. 

I almost forgot to mention – you can also easily create videos with PowerPoint 2010 as well!

6. PowerPoint Broadcasting

I just used this feature a few days ago during my team meeting. PowerPoint 2010 offers a really convenient broadcasting feature that allows you to quickly share your PPT presentation. You can either use a public “PowerPoint Broadcast Service” (all you need is a Live ID and it’s free) or an internal SharePoint server. With a couple clicks, you can email a URL to a group of people and they can watch you deliver your PPTX right from their browser.

7. PowerPoint Transitions

Some might consider this a small feature, but I think it’s absolutely killer. It’s a great way to get “ooohs” and “aaaaahs” from your audience. It really gives some punch when delivering a presentation.

I can’t convey the power of PowerPoint transitions without a video. Below is a video clip that I created using the new PowerPoint video creation feature. I’ve taken a few slides from the SharePoint 2007 Overview session I did at the last SharePoint Conference (March 2008). These are just a few of the transitions that will be available.

8. Copy/Paste

In the past, when I’ve wanted to copy & paste something from a website into Office, it’s been challenging. I’ve had to paste, look, undo, paste special, etc. It’s not clear how the content will render, and while that’s understandable from a technology perspective, as a user who just wants to get work done, it can be frustrating.

In Office 2010, there’s copy and paste live preview. It’s a really convenient feature that allows you to easily preview how different paste options will look without having to undo, paste, undo paste. For example, I’ve copied a region from the twitter website and I now want to include that content in a Word document.

In Word 2010, I can paste and see how the different options will look.

9. SharePoint Workspace

SharePoint Workspace (formerly called Groove) is a rich, seamless way to work with SharePoint content. It allows you to take SharePoint lists & libraries offline, provides a rich client UX and does background syncing with SharePoint which helps with performance especially in low latency situations. It has the Fluent UI making it really intuitive to use.

10. Sparklines

Excel 2010 introduces Sparklines. It gives you the ability to show data trends in a one data cell. It’s especially useful when you’re analyzing numbers over time across a number of time periods. There are many forms sparklines can take from lines to columns to more yes/no type options for win/loss data. You can, for example, see how MSFT stock is doing over the course of a year --- all within one Excel cell. J You have the ability to format sparklines to include high and low points as well as another of other options.

There you have it! Hopefully, you’re discovering your own new favorite features while checking out the Technical Preview.

Bing and Google

If you google Bing or bing Google, you’ll find some really interesting reviews & comparisons between Bing & Google. Almost all of them arrive at a similar conclusion; that 1) Bing is better than Live Search, 2) Bing has differentiation vs. Google in some scenarios and 3) Google still doesn’t have to worry. Bing has more to do, but it’s good to see competition in the search space. I’m a big fan of competition as it leads to innovation and ultimately better products and services for consumers.

Bing > Live; Bing > Google (in some ways)

- For starters, it’s just a better name. Live was too confusing for most people & couldn’t be used as a verb. As silly as that sounds, it makes a difference. Also, the Live brand was overloaded and most people just didn’t get it.

- It’s refreshing. It looks good, cleaner and fresh. I always perceived Google as the king of simplicity and user experience, but Bing just feels better and has a better user experience IMO. I can’t personally put my finger on it, but it’s likely a combination of many things: the picture, navigation, color scheme, page preview functionality. The Bing team even got the little things right – for example, the font seems just right. Google feels ‘oh so 2000.’ :-)

- Relevancy is as good as Google at least for everything I tried searching for.  http://bingle.pwnij.com/ is a neat service you can try for yourself.

- Some services are just better integrated. Bing Travel (Farecast) is nicely integrated as is much of the MSN content; I also think that the image & video search is better.

Why Google doesn’t have to worry (in the short term)

- Google is a habit. It’s part of our vocabulary, it’s the de facto search engine for most people and has been for years. Google doesn’t even have to pay for product placement in movies, television shows & on the news. It’s synonymous with Internet search.

- Some Google services are better. Google has some specific services that give it some differentiation albeit in very targeted scenarios.

- User entry points. There are more entry points for Google than Bing and this trend won’t change in the near term. Google has some very popular user services like YouTube & Gmail. And while they haven’t necessary figured out how to best monetize them, it’s a function of time before they strike the right balance of service vs. advertisement. Beyond services, as the iPhone becomes more & more popular (and boy, is it popular) & browsers like Firefox & Chrome gain more market share, the number of Google search queries will continue to rise. This isn’t even taking into account any penetration with Android & Chrome OS. Google’s push for open source software is motivated by making Google’s search service more ubiquitous. That’s the world of business.

- AdSense. Google enjoys a large ecosystem of customers & partners that isn’t going anywhere. I’m not sure what the revenue percentage is, but I’m sure that revenue stream is significant.

Why Google should be worried (in the longer term)

Google faces some challenges in the intermediate to longer term if they don’t innovate quickly & Bing continues to out innovate them. Today, Bing may not offer significant differentiation for a user to change his/her habit,  but things could change as they continue to innovate.

- User Experience conundrum. I mentioned earlier that Bing has a refreshing user experience. It looks new and gives me different ways to explore content with suggestions and navigation on the left hand side. There’s just enough information on the screen so it’s useful without being over-crowded. I suspect this took a lot of qualitative research to get right by the Bing team. So why doesn’t Google copy and bring a similar experience to its users? I don’t see Google doing that because 1) Google is known for simplicity and adding more content, more information, more graphics can counter that simplicity and can affect their brand; 2) A less obvious reason is the more choices Google presents to users for navigating content, for example, it could distract from the advertizing links on the right; I may be less likely to click on an advertizing link if I have other options elsewhere on a page; user experience research may prove or disprove my theory, but my intuition says that’s a possible outcome.

- Facebook. More & more people are starting their days in Facebook vs. Google. And if Facebook becomes the entry point for users, then the search engine that is powered by Facebook will win. Not only will that search engine serve Facebook search requests, but they will have an opportunity to switch users to their service by becoming more and more familiar.

- Startups. Google’s not the underdog anymore. There are plenty of startups that are funded, even more agile and attracting talent. They can deliver services & technology faster. Google will have to continue attracting great talent and even more importantly retaining great talent. Google has made smart acquisitions in the past, and they should continue keeping their eyes open for new ones.

- Live Services. Watch out! With Office 2010 Office Web Applications, more people will use Live Services and end up interacting with Bing!

My Conclusion

Bing is refreshing and a step in the right direction for Microsoft. There’s still more innovation that needs to be done with search and the various supporting services to drive traffic/switch users, but I for one am a Bing convert! Ultimately, whatever happens, we’ll all benefit and continue to get better search experiences and choice.

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek!

Today is an exciting day because we are announcing that SharePoint 2010 has reached the technical preview engineering milestone. We are sharing a sneak peek of SharePoint 2010 that you can check out @ http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx  (also announced it on the team blog). Check out the amazing videos we’ve posted, read the “Getting Ready” guidance & take a glance at the frequently asked questions we’ve posted. Tom, Richard & Paul have done a super job walking you through a glimpse of what’s in SharePoint 2010! We will go much deeper & broader at the SharePoint Conference.

I’ll write more later this week.

For those of you at WPC, I’m presenting a sneak peek session at WPC as well – so if you’re there, definitely come and check it out!

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

I’m going to be keynoting at the upcoming SharePoint Best Practices Conference in DC on August 24th. It’s a great conference with high quality content where you can learn real best practices from experts in the field. It has a very strong speaker line-up and this year it also includes a SQL track! I’m really looking forward to this conference & hope to see many of you there!

For those of you at the Worldwide Partner Conference, I’ll be speaking there as well on July 14th.

Helping Fight Cancer

Hello everyone! I signed up to participate & run in the Seattle LIVESTRONG Challenge later this June to help raise money for the fight against cancer. I know friends who have fought cancer & I’ve had close family who were victims of it. This year, I’m committed to do my small part to drive awareness and help raise some money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. You can find more information about the foundation at http://www.livestrong.org

I’m reaching out to folks to ask for a donation for this cause. Every dollar goes a long way! You can donate at https://www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=294734&supId=255217075

Thanks!

Distributed Computing and Enterprise 2.0

During my college years, the Internet phenomenon took off. While computer networks was a subject taught at college for many years, it’s not until the 90s that really broad applications emerged. As late as the early 90s, only large private, public & education institutions had access to the Internet. A relatively small number of actual consumers did anything with their 1200 baud MODEMs. I was a BBS sysop back in the days, but that’s another story.

Not everyone had a computer when I went to college. It was a luxury and those who had a computer spent a lot of time playing Doom. You couldn’t walk down any hall and not find at least two people playing Doom. I was playing Doom with people in my dorm. As sad as it is, I was “networking” with others in a new, innovative way beyond simple message boards. While Doom was taking off, so was another buzz. We were all being encouraged to participate in distributed computing projects to help solve difficult problems; most of these at the time were academic or “code breaking” contests, but nevertheless, idle PCs began to participate in a well orchestrated way to solve a problem larger than anyone could solve by themselves.

Distributing computing is a fascinating concept and something that large software systems take advantage of. It breaks down a problem into multiple parts that run in parallel on multiple computers. While the outcome can be absolutely mind-boggling, it takes a lot of work to architect and orchestrate a solution. Some problems, because of their very nature, can’t even be highly distributed. These intricate and complex solutions require a lot of engineering smarts. An equally competent marketing department is required to convince people to participate in an Internet distributing computing project, especially in a world when everyone is worried about security.

So what does distributed computing have to do with Enterprise 2.0? I get to that point a little later.

I’ve been meaning to write an article on ROI & Enterprise 2.0. There are already a couple good ones out there, so instead of rehashing many of the arguments and points already made, I wanted to offer another perspective.

Unstructured & New World of Work: ROI to the Individual

It’s accepted that technology can really help foster innovation and help connect people with similar interests & ideas. It can uncover new ideas, new problems & new solutions. And there’s a certain reality that the workplace is evolving. Almost every desk worker has a computer, has email, uses Instant Messaging and has access to a productivity suite like Office. More and more information workers are on Facebook, many read blogs and a few even have their own blogs. Their personal & professional lives are blended; they are thinking of replacing their Win Mobile/Blackberry phones with an iPhone and wish they had more time to upload and share pictures. That’s the reality. And as more and more people enter the work force, the more ubiquitous this is becoming.

While not all productivity tools are called Enterprise 2.0, every company uses tools that help people connect with others resulting in greater organizational agility and productivity. Email, as archaic as it may sound, has transformed the workplace over the last decade and continues to be the number one way people communicate with their colleagues. In the last few years, more synchronous forms of technologies like instant messaging have been popular.  Even more recently, Unified Communications is a category that every company is looking at; especially in this economy. There’s no argument that these set of technologies have a measurable ROI. There’s also no argument that information workers use these technologies as part of their daily jobs; that they are tools they use to communicate, interact and get something done.

Enterprise 2.0 is popularly associated with some of the newer age tools that promise to even further empower employees to connect with each other and be more productive. Common examples are wikis, blogs, search, tagging – all of which have become super popular on the Internet. And while these technologies have become popular on the Internet for individuals to connect and share information with their friends, a commonly asked question is how these tools can be leveraged in the Enterprise to provide real return on investment; really impact the bottom line?

Loosely Structured & Orchestrated: ROI to Groups and Organizations

As individuals begin to become more “productive” and are able to connect with individuals more easily, how can this be transformed into more measurable organizational/group productivity? Don’t you need a certain critical mass of users to really take advantage of these types of technologies? There are far more consumers in the world than producers. If you take a look at the Wikipedia editing frequency, a very small fraction of users actually make any edits to Wikipedia - but all of us consume Wikipedia data. 

This is where some of the distributed computing background is relevant. If you take a look at Enterprise 2.0 as an opportunity to really take advantage of the people’s knowledge/ideas in a group or organization, you can really build something great. But like I said before, it doesn’t happen automatically, you need some kind of structure/orchestration to get unstructured IP; you need some guidance before it becomes part of the organizational DNA/culture.

In this case, Enterprise 2.0 tools can be used to solve a known problem. This may counter some people’s definition who think Enterprise 2.0 is about grassroots innovation and connections. However, teaching people to use the tools to proactively harness people’s knowledge can result in real measurable results. You can either attempt to encourage people to participate in a process/project voluntarily (for example, think of something like an Idea Exchange solution that is composed of wikis and tagging) or you can use the tools to be a process for real work – for example, a wiki based solution can be used in a large organization in the vision/planning process of a product or project. Instead of a few people checking out and checking in a document, dozens or hundreds of people can participate in a more transparent, participatory process. In some ways, you’re distributing the “computing” to each employee and magnifying impact; each person can participate to create a really rich knowledge base that is unstructured in the way that people can participate and edit, but the end result is very structured. Another personal favorite example I like to use is a FAQ or RFI solution. While it takes work to architect a solution and figure out exactly how to get people to participate, the outcome is measurable.

I realize that buzz phrases like Web 2.0, Social Computing & Enterprise 2.0, have a certain association with grassroots innovation and sound really new age, but with some planning, some of the same technologies can be leveraged to build enterprise solutions that get people involved and solve a big problem. Let’s face it: Doom was cool, fun and exciting and distributed computing was geeky – but they were fundamentally taking advantage of the same underlying infrastructure. And while a real solution that solves a real problem doesn’t attract the same attention that Facebook gets, just give it a cool name, post a video about it on YouTube, create a Facebook group and tweet about it. :-)

Important SP2 Information

If you have deployed SP2 or are looking to deploy SP2, please take a careful look at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx. There's a simple work-around that involves re-entering the PID in the Central Administration License page.