New and improved SharePoint 2010
May 2010 saw the official release of SharePoint 2010, the latest release in the family of software products developed by Microsoft for collaboration, file sharing and web publishing. http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/Pages/default.aspx
The earliest version of Microsoft SharePoint was released in 2001 but it didn’t see widespread adoption until the successful debut of SharePoint 2007 and the integration with social software, such as blogs, wikis and social networking Web sites. With the release of the enhanced 2010 version, Microsoft claims SharePoint is the fastest growing product in company history.
Searching has always been meant to be a cornerstone of SharePoint, and a key element of the value proposition for deploying SharePoint into organisations. The new release incorporates the FAST Search technology that Microsoft acquired from the Norway-based Fast Search & Transfer Company. As its name implies, FAST Search is designed for high-end scalability. It delivers an exceptional intranet and people search experience and a platform for building custom search-driven applications.
Knowledge sharing is one of the vital operations in any organisation. SharePoint 2010 makes knowledge sharing simple and effective. You will be able to make all the vital information available to the entire organisation in a matter of just few clicks. Knowledge sharing has never been any easier. SharePoint 2010 also allows version control and document approval functionalities.
SharePoint can provide significant help with Business Intelligence strategy. It will let you store data that represents your organization’s key business processes, to organize that data in a useful manner, and to present it as meaningful information. Knowledge workers can act on that information to increase productivity and to provide feedback that improves underlying business processes.
Microsoft SharePoint and the Office Suite of Applications have had integration points with each other for several years, but now with 2010 there have been significant enhancements to this story. Collaboration has become an intuitive part of the user experience, and is a familiar ingredient in all of the Office 2010 Applications. The powerful combination of SharePoint and Office means that, not only will individual efficiency increase, but teams will be able to communicate effectively, stay in touch and of course work on shared content.
SharePoint 2010 represents the culmination of a vision that puts SharePoint at the core of an organization’s Enterprise Content and Application strategy. Microsoft listened and learned from customers using SharePoint 2007, and the maturity of the product as both an end-user and development platform is enormous.
SharePoint 2010 fun
Last week saw the official release of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 beta, which I eagerly got downloaded as soon as I could. The release promises to be a significant one for Microsoft when the product is made available to buy next year. For now though, those willing can have a play with the Beta, which you can get from here.
The biggest change, from the point of view of getting it up and running, is that the product is now 64-bit only. This instantly rules out running it in VPC, which is what I'd normally do. Instead, you can use Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, or, as I did, tp://www.virtualbox.org/" target="_blank">VirtualBox from Sun, which is a free virtualization client that can handle 64-bit VMs on a normal desktop PC. I went for the new Server 2008 R2 release as the base OS for the VM, and SQL Server 2008 (all 64-bit obviously). For me, this was the first time I'd run this setup on my desktop machine, but the initial setup and installation was pretty painless. Unless the SharePoint bit!
Firstly, SharePoint 2010 requires a lot of cumulative update patches, which MS detail for you in the installation instructions. It's not a major issue, just takes some time to get the correct versions and get them all installed. Being me, I hadn't FULLY read through the installation guide top to bottom, and missed a few required updates. Thankfully, SharePoint prompted me along the way, advising each upgrade that was required.
Next was a case of actually getting SharePoint up and running. The initial install was straightforward, and instantly familiar to anyone who has played with 2007. Once you get into Central Admin, things begin to change, with a whole new setup wizard that guides you through the initial configuration of SharePoint. At this point, the problems began. Despite having a glut of memory and resources available, SharePoint ran incredibly slowly, and began to error intermittently, sometimes with timeout errors, sometimes with unknown errors that seemed to come and go at will. This seems to mirror some experiences I've read about on the web.
Whether or not these issues are down to VirtualBox, which I haven't used for this type of setup before, or that SharePoint 2010 really needs a lot of resources to perform well, I'll have to investigate. Ishai seems to suggest better luck with a non-virtualized setup, so I'll be trying that next. From the initial experience, the release is looking very promising, with some compelling new features (which I'll discuss in another post). Now if only I can get it running without it crashing all the time.........
Paul Dunlop
