Within a few months (June 2010), SharePoint 2010 should be released (finally!) to the general public and the SharePoint 2010 revolution will begin.  It’s not just the business and your customers—internal and external—that will benefit from enhancements to SharePoint 2010.  With more enterprises storing more mission-critical data in SharePoint, Microsoft was compelled to bring to the table significant improvements to the administration, management, security, development, deployment, and governance of SharePoint implementations.  What Microsoft has created in the three years since the release of SharePoint 2007 is impressive.  In today’s blog, I’ll define some nifty features in SharePoint 2010 that you as an end user / end developer should take advantage and use in the 2010.

 

Access Services

Access Services lets user-generated databases in Microsoft Access become part of SharePoint for easier management by IT.  When a user creates an Access database and publishes it to SharePoint, the Access tables become SharePoint lists and the Access forms become ASP.NET pages in SharePoint.  The data stays in SharePoint, accessible via a browser and Access acts as a client for data manipulation, reporting, and viewing.

 

PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint

PowerPivot lets users work with very large volumes of data and publish their work to SharePoint for others to view and interact with by using a browser.  Workbooks published to SharePoint can be managed as you would a SQL Server Analysis Services application.  PowerPivot for SharePoint displays data via a gallery based on Microsoft SilverLight, and there’s also a dashboard for monitoring and managing the PowerPivot environment.  In addition, there’s a Web Service that ports PowerPivot data via XMLA to external applications such as Report Builder.  Together, the client add-in and server components provide an end-to-end solution that furthers business intelligence data analysis for Excel users on the workstation and on SharePoint sites.

SharePoint 2010 Object Model

SharePoint 2010 API includes some new great features which allow developers to quickly create solutions and to connect to other applications and systems.

LINQ – With LINQ we can run queries for retrieving SharePoint data.  LINQ also provides strongly typed access to data in Visual Studio offering compile time validation to help avoid runtime errors.  And the most important syntax is very similar to SQL, no more CAML.  LINQ can be used to query, in principle, any data source whatsoever, all that is necessary to make a data source accessible with LINQ is that to create a LINQ provider for the data source.  One of the coolest things is the possibility to join results from multiple lists and multiple data sources.  This is very a powerful element to use SharePoint Lists; you can almost see this as a Data Layer.

REST (Representational State Transfer) – REST help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint framework, having the SharePoint APIs available everywhere makes it possible to integrate to SharePoint from almost any applications including those on non-Windows platforms whether they are on the client, server or in the cloud.  Unlike SOAP, REST is not a protocol, is using HTTP to retrieve and send data and is more like a Web APIs with more direct communications.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) – With the Business Connectivity Services it is now easier to integrate SharePoint 2010 with back end systems. The main benefits are the Read/WRITE to External Systems, Familiar UI to External Data, No-Code Connectivity to External systems, Offline Access to External Data, Governance of External Data, Discovery Via Search, Life Cycle Management.  All this makes it easy to integrate SharePoint with external systems. Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint includes these features:

• Business Data Connectivity (BDC) service
• BDC Connectors and the pluggable Connector Framework
• External lists
• External data columns
• External data in search
• Secure Store service
• External Data Web Parts
• Profile pages
• External data in workflow
• Rich client integration
• SharePoint Client API

These API’s are completely new in SharePoint.  Finally there is easy way to build Rich Internet Application like Ajax and SilverLight that cans retrieve data from our SharePoint application.

SilverLight – With the SilverLight Client API we can easily develop Rich Internet Applications that integrate in our SharePoint application.  A SilverLight application can run on the browser or on the client desktop.  To create a Silverlight Application with the SharePoint Client Object Model, use Visual Studio 2010, select Silverlight Application and add a reference to these two assemblies:

• Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll
• Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll

You can find them under the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\ClientBin folder

ECMAScript-  With the ECMAScript Client API we can easily develop Rich Internet Applications like Ajax or simple ASPX page with JavaScript that integrate in our SharePoint application.

To create an ASPX page with the SharePoint Client Object Model, add an ASPX page under the Layouts folder (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS) and register the SP.js file by adding a ScriptLink.

.NET Managed – With the .NET Managed API we can easily develop Rich Desktop Applications like Windows Presentation Foundation (WCF), Windows form application or an Add-In to Outlook that integrate with our SharePoint application. These applications can run on the client desktop.  To create Windows Application with the SharePoint Client Object Model, use Visual Studio 2010, select Windows Form Application and add a reference to these two assemblies:

• Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll
• Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll

You can find them under the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ ISAPI folder

SharePoint 2010 Object Model includes a number of new features and functionalities for developers…now that you are aware of them…take advantage of these new capabilities!

Developer Dashboard

The developer dashboard is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 that is design to provide additional performance and tracing information that can be used to debug and troubleshoot issues with page rendering time.  With this new feature, IT pros and Developers can identify issues common and how to resolve these issues.  Developers can also use the dashboard to monitor code and diagnose bugs.  The dashboard offers a view on the bottom of each page that includes http request details, the time each request took, web server details, database queries, and more. You can set it to on, off, or on-demand.   A must have tool for any SharePoint developer!

Visual Upgrade

When you upgrade to SharePoint Foundation 2010, a new feature in the upgrade lets an admin choose among the following upgrade options:

• Adopt the new look for all sites during upgrade
• Let site owners decide the look after upgrade
• Keep the old look after upgrade

If the admin decides to let the site owners make the decision after upgrade, a preview option becomes available in the site UI after the upgrade is finished.  If the site owner likes the visual upgrade, he or she can accept it.  If the site owner likes the previous look, the site can be changed to the previous Windows SharePoint Services look and feel.  What a concept…administrators will love this!

Content Organizer

When you activate Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010, this new and improved routing feature extends, enhances and makes more broadly available the routing engine used in the Records Center site template from SharePoint 2007.  It not only allows you to automatically route documents to different libraries and folders within those libraries, it can also be used for mundane housekeeping type activities such as making sure that no folder within a document library contains more than 5000 items, for example.  When item number 5001 is added to the library, the Content Organizer can automatically create a new folder and put the document in that folder.  All of this routing and folder creation can be handled automatically without further user intervention.  After a document is uploaded and the required metadata applied, the upload form displays a Url to a document that has been routed so the user knows where to find it in the future.

Conclusion

Diamond is a Microsoft Gold partner specializing in Information Worker solutions consisting of SharePoint, Exchange, OCS and Office.  Contact us today to chat about an upcoming project or pain point in your organization.  Diamond Technologies takes the uncertainty out of SharePoint and IT!