June, 2010

If your farm is still running 2007 products, you may want to have a look into these new cumulative updates. They must be installed on the farm that reaches the SP1 patch level or above.

Description of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Cumulative Update Server Hotfix Package (MOSS server-package): June 29, 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983310

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Cumulative Update Server Hotfix Package (WSS server-package): June 29, 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983311

Description of the Project Server 2007 hotfix package (Pjsrvapp-x-none.msp; Pjsrvwfe-x-none.msp): June 29, 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983312

You can read the description of each packages (click into the detail KBs) to find what they fixed. It is not necessary to apply them if you are not affected by those issues. For more information on how to apply updates, check Update Resource Center.

Jie.

I was pinged many times for multilingual search in SharePoint in the past. One of the issues is word breaking – in SharePoint 2007 if you set browser language to some other language than you are searching in, you may trigger the wrong wordbreaker and have a bad result. SharePoint 2010 improved on this topic and now it is more multilingual friendly, for example it has Results Query language setting in the webpart. But what is the order of this process? If user set a browser language will it override the setting in the webpart? And do I have to install OS/SharePoint language packs to get my search working?

Luckily I just got a very detailed answer from Harneet Sidhana, Program Manager of SharePoint Productivity Search. So here’s the order of the language detection process:

1. If the user specified a language preference using the advanced language preference setting. If there is only one language selected, then this becomes the language of query. If user selected multiple languages, then there is a dropdown enabled in the user interface to select the default language.
   
   
    
2. If the above is not set by a user, an administer can set language on each search page as follows:
   a. Edit the search results page
   b. Edit the core results web part
   c. Under Result Query Options – Use the Query Language Dropdown to select the preferred language for the results page
   
     
3. If none of the above are set, then we use the default language of the browser as the language of the query:
   
   
4. If none of the above are set (which is unlikely since most of the people do have a default language in their browser) we default to CultureInfo.InvariantCulture as the language of the query (fixed in a recent QFE. Without the QFE, the user will see an exception instead).

And for the second question, you don’t have to install OS language packs or SharePoint language packs to search in multilingual. All the wordbreakers and stemmers are included in the binaries you installed, no matter which language SKU you have. I know some of the trainers and “SME”s are telling people you have to do so, that maybe true for MUI(but not always), definitely not true for search.

Jie.

Despite the draft status, HTML5 is indeed a hot topic this year. Audio/Video tag and codec war, Canvas, Local Storage… So now the question comes: Does/Will SharePoint 2010 support HTML5?

Depending on what you want, the answer may be quite different. I always ask some questions before I answer the supportability question: What do you mean by support? What do you want to achieve?

So here’s why I’m asking:

1. Most of the time it’s up to browsers to support HTML5 content rendering, not SharePoint. If you implemented new features in HTML5 on your site, it may means people with legacy browsers cannot use it. So either you need to provide a workaround, or you should make sure every visitor of your content is using IE9/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera, etc. In some scenarios this make sense, for example you want to build a SharePoint video site dedicated to iPad users, but most of the time you will have mixed browsers.
2. Although browsers gradually started to support *some* of the new features in HTML5, it is still in draft. Which means a lot of things can still change, or be implemented, for example the codec for <video> tag. Microsoft and Apple have chosen H.264 for native support, while Mozilla, Google and Opera is more on the WebM/VP8 side (although a VP8 codec installation can help IE9 to support it). The editor of HTML5 specification estimated it will reach W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation stage in the year 2022 or later.
3. Many scenarios are also easy to achieve by using Silverlight and even Flash. HTML5 is technically good, but that does not directly turn it into a wonderful experience for web designers all the time. If you know who your audience will be, what browser/OS they mainly use, and consider the experience/efficiency of your implementation team, HTML5 may or may not be the best choice.

If you answered the questions and considered the above points, you will have a general idea whether you want to use HTML5 or not in your project. Now the question turns into another way: Are you trying to get HTML5 tags into SharePoint 2010 pages, or are you trying to make SharePoint 2010 to output HTML5 pages that can be validated?

• If you want to use HTML5 tags in SharePoint 2010 pages, it is certainly fine – it’s up to the browsers to render those tags. Here’s an example for <video> tag. Please use IE9 Platform Preview 3, Safari or Chrome to visit it since they support H.264 codec. (A mp4 file loaded into Shared Documents, and a Content Editor Webpart is used to put in <video> tag)
  http://www.sharepointisawesome.com
  
  
  The implementation is done by using Content Editor Webpart. You may also notice there’s another HTML5 Canvas demo here. This is just one of the ways of adding HTML5 tags into the page. As long as the browsers can render it, it works. And this is also supported just like to add generic HTML content into SharePoint pages. Since you are adding HTML5 tags inside a XHTML 1.0 page, a complex HTML5 application may or may not have issues, you are responsible for testing of the code you added.
• If you want make SharePoint to output native HTML5 pages and get validated, then the answer will be no. There’s not much I can say regarding the future versions of SharePoint, but this will not be supported in the SharePoint 2010 timeframe. SharePoint 2010 is designed to output content in XHTML 1.0 natively. It is impossible to get all the components completely rewritten to produce validated HTML5 pages, and not to mention HTML5 is still in draft, and will still be in draft for several years.

Hope this helps to clarify the questions of HTML5 and SharePoint 2010.

#Update: IE9 Platform Preview 3 is released for public: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ 
It supports audio and video tags, plus canvas. My demo is working in the preview, but you have to select "Force IE9 Document mode" in the menu since we are not outputing native HTML5 pages. The test result shows a lot of progress has been made in IE9 development.

Jie.