SharePoint Roadmap and Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up
Hi! I thought I would follow Kurt’s post with some background on our next release of the SharePoint technologies and the thought process behind one of the goals for the release that we internally call “light-up not just roll-up”.
SharePoint for the Office 12 Wave
As we did with Office and SharePoint 2003, we are designing, developing and testing the SharePoint technologies as part of the Office “12” cycle to make sure we have an end-to-end solution. Of course, you will continue be able to access a growing number of SharePoint features with just a web browser, previous versions of Office and other applications. We began sharing information on Office and SharePoint 12 at the PDC in September (check out Steven Sinofsky’s keynote) and the technical beta in November.
We think about SharePoint in two parts – the underlying platform (e.g. the web site framework, list and document storage, security model) and the solutions build on top. With the new platform investments in Windows SharePoint Services - including support for ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation - we are making it easier for developers to build, deploy and integrate sophisticated applications vs. rolling their own web framework from scratch. While this is in response to a lot of terrific feedback from SharePoint developer community, it is also the foundation of we are doing inside Microsoft for the next release of our SharePoint solutions.
For the Office 12 wave, we are investing on top of the WSS platform in six solution areas. Below is an overview with more to come in future postings:
- Collaboration – richer calendars, surveys, discussions and e-mail integration, blogs, wikis, RSS, offline (in Outlook and Groove), basic project management (with Project Server for larger projects), tracking applications (including Access integration), etc.
Portal – published portals built on the new CMS integration, declarative LOB integration from web services, database and 3rd-party applications like SAP and enhanced MySites with aggregation, personalization and social networking
Search – improved user experience, relevance, administration and programmability and rich support for finding people and business data with a consistent experience across WSS and SPS.
Content Management – integrated document, records and web content management including workflow, metadata, security, policies, template publishing, etc. and upgrade from CMS 2002 to an integrated SPS \ CMS (more on this soon but the goal is to make it much easier to build and manage a sophisticated internet or intranet site)
Business Process – server-based XML forms designed with InfoPath and rendered in either web browsers or the rich InfoPath client integrated with SharePoint including the new workflow capabilities with web, graphical and Visual Studio-based customization
Business Intelligence - business intelligence portals with dashboards, KPIs, SQL Analysis Reporting Services integration and Excel capabilities on the server combining the flexibility of the spreadsheet with the power of server-based deployment and rendering
We are still working on packaging and will update you on that as soon as we are finalized. But generally, the platform and collaboration solution capabilities will continue to be part of Windows Server providing a broad platform and “next-generation file server” for developers, users and IT. The rest of the solutions will be provided on top.
Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up
We have seen in many organizations that “portals” and “team sites” are not really discrete points vs. a continuum of web presences. Supporting this was a big focus of our V2 but we are excited about the evolution in the model in V3 so I thought I’d give how we thought about this.
When we delivered V1, we got a lot of feedback that the previous top-down worlds of “portals” and bottoms-up world of “collaboration” was not that clean. The disparate user, developer and manager experiences really did not make sense. If you did custom development for a portal (e.g. a web part viewing sales information), why couldn’t the sales team use that web part? We saw lots of “team” sites were calling themselves “portals” (the word means an “important web site” to most people so who doesn’t want their web site to be important?). This caused a lot of pain for both users and IT. That led us to putting the web part framework into WSS (and now with version 3 into ASP.NET 2.0 to support a broader set of applications and re-use) and building SPS 2003 on top of WSS 2003 so we could have the continuity between portals and collaboration.
SPS 2003 was primarily focused on aggregation and personalization (Search, MySites, Site Directory) or what we call “Roll-up”. But we have been surprised about the adoption pattern and seen far more portals than we expected in organizations and many team sites that want “portal” features. Microsoft’s own IT group has an internally hosted service that supports over 300 portals! We also realized we needed to take the model forward as we added new capabilities above WSS like document lifecycle, web publishing and reporting that were clearly not just for parent portals.
So we began the 12 release with a mantra - “Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up” - so every site could have every capability whether provided by Microsoft or an external developer. As part of WSS V3 we are introducing a new feature we call “featurization” (still named by the development team . . .) where the server administration deploys new capabilities and the site administration can decide if they are available to users in their site. We are using this to build the 6 categories of solution features I described on top of the WSS platform using this model. Now any SharePoint site can be supercharged with new features when you deploy a value-added product like SPS or our partner solutions.
This raised a couple questions. First, won’t sites get too busy with all these features? Possibly, but we also saw is one size doesn’t fit all so we are introducing focused templates (e.g. a large document library vs. an internet presence) to support specific scenarios and expose a practical subset of features. Second, won’t this lead to more chaos on an intranet as more sites become “portals”? Not necessarily. Just because more capabilities are exposed, does not mean you can’t impose whatever structure works for your organization and culture.
Some companies create the site structure for all their sites all up front and let few users change it. Others are more decentralized and let a thousands flowers bloom. Most are into the middle where they create the official portals and let users create team and project sites below this. Our goal is to provide a template, security and aggregation model to let you use whatever approach to intranet, extranet and internet presence design makes sense for you. We’ll also have better support for physical and hierarchies in the next release to enable this.
We will be getting into many more details in future posts. If you are interested in more right away, I would recommend Arpan’s blog and PJ’s video on Channel 9.
Jeff Teper, GM - SharePoint Portal, Content Management and Search
