Arpan Shah's Blog

Some New SharePoint 2010 Content

arpans — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:21:41 GMT

I wanted to quickly highlight some of the recent content we recently published:

- You can download the SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machine here.

- Check out the What's New in SharePoint 2010 for Developers clinic; a free 2-hour e-learning course

- Check out the What's New in SharePoint 2010 for IT Pros clinic; it's a 2-hour free e-learning course!

If you’re looking for a good list of readiness/training content, I recommend taking a look at this post. I try to keep this up-to-date. I generally also tweet when new content is available. You can follow me @arpanshah.

SharePoint 2010 Webcast Deck

arpans — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:10:40 GMT

I just did a SharePoint 2010 webcast and wanted to share the deck I presented. You can find it @ http://cid-ca582f2bc3ad1590.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Presentations/SharePoint%202010/sp2010.pptx

I will update this post with a pointer to the recording when (if) it’s available.

SharePoint Online in the 2010 wave

arpans — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:32:00 GMT

I’m a big fan of SharePoint Online along with over one million other users out there. It’s a reliable, convenient service that allows companies to take advantage of SharePoint without having to host it themselves. It’s software-as-a-service at its best.

SharePoint Online today, based on SharePoint 2007, does a good job providing some of the core SharePoint capabilities. In the second half of this calendar year, SharePoint Online will be updated to SharePoint 2010 at which point it will be even more powerful & provide even greater parity with SharePoint 2010 “On-Premises”. This is largely due to all the investments we’ve made in the 2010 wave around multi-tenancy and extensibility.

Timeline
SharePoint Online is available today. The current service is based on the SharePoint 2007 platform. A limited beta of SharePoint Online on the 2010 platform is expected to be available at the end of this half (CY10H1); final release is expected in the second half of this year (CY10H2).

Multi-Tenancy
The team has done a lot of work focusing on “hosting” as a core scenario in the 2010 wave. With SharePoint 2007 today, a site collection serves as a tenant boundary delivering some of the core WSS 3.0 features along with some of the MOSS 2007 features such as web content management. However, when it comes to MOSS 2007 especially, not all of the features are optimal for multiple tenants. For example, BDC, Excel Services and many of the other Shared Service Providers (SSPs) are not easily manageable by different site collection owners.

In the SharePoint 2010 wave, we have made changes and focused on making sure the features are multi-tenant. This also includes a tenant administration site to allow you to centrally manage the various sites & configuration. From a functionality perspective what this means to customers & partners is that they’ll be able to get all the goodness of SharePoint 2010 such as social computing, web content management & enterprise content management, just to name a few, with SharePoint Online. I expect a very high % of end-user feature parity from an end-user perspective (I talk about extensibility next) between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises. Of course, this depends on what SKU you are looking at!

Extensibility
Multi-tenancy investments in SharePoint 2010 mean more end-user feature parity between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises; add to this the improved extensibility & developer story for SharePoint Online and you have a really great SaaS offering that customers & partners can bet their business on.

Extensibility is important for any solution. Whether it’s heavy customization or last mile touch-ups, whether you are Microsoft, IBM or Google, customers & partners need to be able to customize their solution. And almost always, cloud solutions provide less flexibility than on-premises solutions; that’s one of the trade-offs organizations must make. With the 2010 wave, the extensibility/developer story for SharePoint Online has significant improvements and enables a wide range of scenarios from small cosmetic changes to custom code solutions:

SharePoint Browser UX . The new SharePoint UX allows end-users to very easily modify the site theme, switch the site chrome (master page) and modify site content (web content, rich media and documents). The new wiki-like interface and new SharePoint Ribbon really make it easy to interact with and make SharePoint look and work the way you want. New web parts like the Media Web Part and Silverlight Web Part allow end users to easily add media & rich Silverlight applications to SharePoint.
Improvements in SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010. SPD 2010 allows non-professional developers to very easily make customizations. The new ribbon interface in SPD surface features in a very intuitive & contextual way. Improved workflow, improved data views, support for InfoPath forms and entity modeling are just a few of the enhancements in SPD.
Web Services. This builds on the existing extensibility we have with SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2010 will continue to expose web services that external applications can call into.
Business Connectivity Services (BCS). New to SharePoint Online, with SPD 2010 & BCS, you’ll be able to model business entities by connecting to WCF end points. This will allow you to connect your SharePoint Online application to external systems.
Client OM. New to SharePoint 2010, the client OM allows developers to develop solutions that don’t run on the server. This becomes a powerful way to develop .NET applications that integrate with SharePoint. A really great example of this: Silverlight applications. With the SharePoint Client OM & Silverlight, developers will be able to create really rich applications on top of SharePoint Online that run on the client, interact with the server (SharePoint Online) and are accessible across multiple browser technologies.
Sandbox Solutions. With the new Sandbox Solution feature, developers can now upload custom code into the SharePoint Online environment. Specifically, developers can use the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools to develop partially trusted code (Sandbox Solutions), package them up as a WSP and upload them into SharePoint Online. Examples include custom web parts and event receivers. While full-trust solutions will not be supported, this goes a long way to extending SharePoint Online with custom business logic. For some complex scenarios, I even envision developers developing hybrid SharePoint Online Sandbox Solutions with Windows Azure.

SKUs
The below slide comes from a session on licensing from the SharePoint Conference and does a good job summarizing the various SharePoint Online SKUs in the 2010 wave. It’s worth calling out the new SKUs. The Enterprise USL is self-explanatory as it provides Enterprise CAL functionality; the Internet Sites offer provides a public facing website portal with underlying web content management (WCM); the Partner Access offer enables company employees to collaborate with authenticated external partners within SharePoint Online.

Fore more information, you can also check out a recent podcast I did on SharePoint Online @ http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/archive/2010/01/13/sharepoint-online-and-sharepoint-2010-ecm-episode-41.aspx

SharePoint 2010 End-User Training

arpans — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:04:22 GMT

Point8020 has released free SharePoint 2010 end user training that you can access from http://www.point8020.com/SharePointEndUserTraining.aspx. It includes 50 short videos for end-users & site administrators covering a number of different common tasks.

These videos are consumable, easy to navigate and free!

I highly recommend checking it out. Point8020 plans to release many more end-user training videos covering all aspects of SharePoint later this half!

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade

arpans — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:39:00 GMT

I went to Bangalore, India, a couple weeks ago as part of the Microsoft team that hosted SharePoint 2010 Ignite Developer. I had an opportunity to meet 75+ sharp developers from various partner organizations like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant & Persistent just to name a few.

As part of a summary session I delivered, I emphasized the upgrade options available along with 2010 system requirements & developer environment options that I wanted to highlight here (slides available here) .

Upgrade
Check out the upgrade & migration resource center @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee517214.aspx. There are 4 primary scenarios that come up when talking about upgrade:

1. SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
- In-place
- Content DB detach/attach

2. SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010
- The upgrade path is from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
- We recommend only upgrading the content
- More detailed information available on the team blog @ http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/01/04/planning-for-upgrade-from-sharepoint-portal-server-2003-to-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx

3. Other products to SharePoint 2010
- You can use open source solutions available at http://www.codeplex.com or partner technologies like Metalogix & Tzunami.

4. SharePoint 2010 Public Beta to Final Release
- We do not broadly support this upgrade path. This means you should only use SharePoint 2010 public beta as a proof of concept, limited deployment for purposes of giving feedback & training/exploration. You should not attempt to upgrade this to release bits. Please plan and set expectations accordingly with your team/organization.
- If you are a TAP/RDP customer, we will support this. TAP/RDP programs are now closed.

System Requirements
Here’s a good summary of system requirements @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.14).aspx.

Specific things worth calling out:
- SharePoint 2010 is available in 64-bit only which means you will require 64-bit hardware; 32-bit not supported
- Windows Server 2008 SP2+ is required; Windows Server 2008 R2 is also supported. Windows Server 2003 is not supported.
- 64-bit SQL 2005 or SQL 2008 required. SQL 2000 and all 32-bit versions not supported.
- On client machines, we will not support Internet Explorer 6.0.

Development Environment
Here’s a good summary @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx.

Here is an overview of the various options you have for setting up a SharePoint 2010 development environment:
- You can install SharePoint 2010 on the metal for development on top of 1) 64-bit Windows Server 2008 SP2+ (R2 also works) or 2) 64-bit client Windows OS Windows 7/Vista.
- You can use Microsoft Virtualization technology such as 1) Windows Server 2008 64-bit Hyper-V or you can 2) boot from VHD using a Windows 7 64-bit Base OS.
- Potentially use other virtualization technologies.

SharePoint 2010 Training

arpans — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:51:00 GMT

(I'm trying to keep this list of resources current. I also frequently tweet when new content/resources are available. You can follow me @arpanshah).

SharePoint 2010 will be the biggest release of SharePoint ever. With the public beta out and the final release only months away (first half of 2010), it’s a good time to start learning about SharePoint 2010. This release, we have a lot of great content available early. I thought I would outline some of the key resources, training and documents available today. For SharePoint Conference (SPC) attendees, the below resources are in addition to the SPC content & resources.

Whether you are an end-user, architect, developer or administrator, I recommend spending the time to go over the Overview resources.

Overview
The first thing to do is understand what features & functionality SharePoint 2010 offers.

Key site: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com

- I recommend watching Jeff Teper’s SharePoint Conference Keynote that provides a good high-level overview of SharePoint 2010
- I strongly recommend reading the evaluation guide end-to-end and taking a look at this PPTX deck.
- I also recommend reading Jeff’s comprehensive SharePoint 2010 blog post as well as my personal top few features
- My SharePoint 2010 Overview session from the SharePoint Conference should be available shortly; when it’s available, I’ll update this post with a link!

End-User

- Point8020 released 50+ free end-user videos that cover common SharePoint tasks @ http://www.point8020.com/SharePointEndUserTraining.aspx.

Developer

Key site: http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com (redirects to MSDN)
Learning path web page
Download learning path

- Check out the developer 2010 video & top features
- Check out the What's New in SharePoint 2010 for Developers clinic; a free 2-hour e-learning course
- Read the SharePoint 2010 Professional Developers Evaluation Guide
- If you’re new to SharePoint 2010 development, I recommend taking a look at the content at http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com
- If you’ve been hands on with SharePoint 2007 development, I recommend taking a look at http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/SharePoint2010Developer/
- Download the SharePoint Developer Platform Poster
- Download the beta!
- Download the Hands-on Labs

Administrator

Key site: http://www.mssharepointitpro.com (redirects to TechNet)
Learning path web page
Download learning path

- Check out the IT Pro 2010 video & top features
- Check out the What's New in SharePoint 2010 for IT Pros clinic; it's a 2-hour free e-learning course!
- Read the SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide for IT Professionals
- Take a look at the training and videos @ http://www.mssharepointitpro.com
- Download the beta!

Training

For those looking for instructor-led training, we will be launching 4 courses (2 for developers, 2 for IT professionals/administrators) in the SharePoint 2010 release timeframe. These courses will be available to Microsoft Certified Partners for Learning Solutions (CPLS), and I expect these courses to be very popular and widely available. Along with the courses, we will have corresponding Technology Specialist & Professional exams for developers & IT Professionals/admins.

If you’re a partner, we are currently offering free SharePoint 2010 training (“Ignite”) and you can learn more information @ https://partner.microsoft.com/40121316. We are offering many different types of deliveries including instructor-led, virtual & online. I recommend talking to your local Microsoft partner manager for more information as the subsidiary/district your in might be running a local Ignite training course.

Other Content

You can download the SharePoint 2010 Virtual Machine here.

Community

There are many ways to get involved with the SharePoint community! You can follow us on our team blog, join the SharePoint forums, join twitter and follow a number of community members, sign up for a search alert to track community blog entries and much more. Here’s some more information and pointers on our community page @ http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Community/Pages/default.aspx. I also recommend connecting with your local Microsoft representative to see if you can get involved in a more local user groups. Some user groups are extremely active and a fantastic opportunity to meet new people & share ideas.

Books/Whitepapers

I expect A LOT of books to be available at release. For now, some of the best “books” are the 3 evaluations guides for the Overview, Developer & IT Pro investments:

- SharePoint 2010 Overview Evaluation Guide
- SharePoint 2010 Professional Developers Evaluation Guide
- SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide for IT Professionals

SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 whitepaper is also worth reading:

- SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Scenarios

For architects/developers wondering when to use ASP.NET vs. SharePoint, I recommend taking a look at the following two whitepapers:

- SharePoint Server 2010 as an Application Development Platform
- SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform

Recent Keynote Videos

- SharePoint Conference keynote videos
- PDC Keynote Video (starts @ 1:57:49)
- PDC Walk-in video

Have a Question?

Ask your question in the SharePoint 2010 forums @ http://www.mssharepointforums.com. Folks from the SharePoint team, MVPs and general community are answering questions.

I plan to update this post as new things are available from now until release. So stay tuned!

SharePoint 2010 Platform Differentiation

arpans — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:27:00 GMT

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

arpans — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:37:29 GMT

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

arpans — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:44:11 GMT

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

arpans — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:26:55 GMT

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

arpans — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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

arpans — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:38:41 GMT

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

arpans — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:47:00 GMT

[updated]

Take a look at this post for the latest SharePoint 2010 training resources.

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek Presentation

arpans — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:31:14 GMT

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.

Building Solutions on SharePoint

My Top Office 2010 Tech Preview Features

arpans — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:53:19 GMT

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.