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Building a SharePoint House
Recently, I attended the “SharePoint Conference.ORG” designed for enterprises, government and non-profit organizations that use or intend to use SharePoint. This conference provided an excellent opportunity to assess the capabilities of new SharePoint 2010 technology and how it is changing the enterprise solution space.
Enterprises have been using SharePoint for content management, document management, collaboration and business intelligence. The Conference focused on how SharePoint 2010 aims to establish itself as a true enterprise platform by providing better integration with external applications, enhanced social features, better content management features, enhanced search capabilities and a richer user experience.
The Framework
Whenever I work with SharePoint, I can’t help but think of it as a construction project. When any industry matures, it starts developing standard patterns, practices and frameworks, and components that come in standard packages. In my opinion, SharePoint is that framework within the enterprise collaboration industry. Rightfully so, the base framework is called SharePoint Foundation 2010. It lays an excellent foundation to build enterprise portals.
New Features in SharePoint 2010
The conference focused on new concepts that 2010 brings to enterprise solutions. Some major enhancements are made in the fields of Content Strategy, Taxonomy, User Experience, Governance, Workflow, Business Integration, Search and Social Networking.
I like to think of content as the artifacts in a house. In enterprises, content comprises the assets around which portals are built. For content management systems, the primary concern is to organize enterprise content in such a way that information can be retrieved in an effective manner. SharePoint 2010 provides great tools for content authoring and content storage such as lists, libraries, metadata and search. Equally important is the lifecycle of the content; for this there needs to be a clearly defined policy for governance. Every house has some rules that everyone should abide by; similarly all the portal users should abide by these corporate policies and regulations. Workflows, authorization frameworks and content policies in SharePoint 2010 are the tools for implementing these rules and regulations.
Just like every house has its own personality, enterprises have their special dialect. Everything in a house can be tagged with those special terms. Similarly, organizations tend to develop special terms and tag contents with them. In SharePoint you can define these special terms with a new centralized taxonomy feature. You can share the taxonomy across multiple portals across different departments.
Communication is the most important element to any successful household. Similarly, in an organization, people like to know what their peers have been reading, what they are doing, what they have been working on and what they like and/or dislike. SharePoint 2010 is fully loaded with new social media capabilities such as content tagging, rating, tag clouds, status updates, organization tree and sharable profiles. I am convinced that SharePoint 2010 will make intranet communications a whole lot more fun.
As a house is no good without facilities provided by the neighborhood, I strongly believe that no portal is an island. Organizations can enhance their portal by integrating existing applications; aggregating data and providing users with personalized views into the applications. SharePoint 2010 pushed the boundary for enterprise application integration with the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS). SharePoint provides a great search experience with visual searches, suggestions, faceted search and a customizable, ranking model. It is tightly integrated with metadata and has the capacity to index external contents including databases, network files and sites. In my opinion, a good search leads to better discoverability; better discoverability leads to greater adoption; greater adoption leads to successful applications.
Support for Designers
The first impression is the last impression! Users come to your portal from using sophisticated applications, such as Facebook and Twitter; they expect the same user experience from your application. There is no reason why a highly functional portal has an archaic look. The SharePoint 2010 user interface is significantly improved over SharePoint 2007 with multi-browser support, and numerous user interface enhancements. SharePoint 2010 enhancements include multi-browser support, contextual office style ribbon interface, AJAX style dialogue box and out-of-box Silverlight web part integration. Top it with HTML5 and CSS 3 and your portal should provide bleeding edge User Experience.
Tools for Developers
Developers are like a construction crew and a handyman is as good as his tools. The conference covered rich tools for developers that SharePoint 2010 brings to the table. SharePoint 2010 truly integrates with Visual Studio; it provides more project templates, a better GUI for rapid development and huge improvements for packaging and deployment. New managed/unmanaged client side object models, sandbox solutions, and business connectivity service (BCS) will definitely bring some interesting solutions for SharePoint 2010. There is no doubt that there will be huge productivity gains.
Tools for Administrators and Migration Strategies
Administrators are like a maintenance crew for your portal. They make sure your portal runs smoothly when it is being actively developed as well as in maintenance mode and now they have a new tool – PowerShell. Lots of organizations fear migration, just like moving into a new house. As with any move, there needs to be detailed planning; involving decisions like how the old content will live in the new environment, how you can make it easily available and how you will organize it so that you can maximum the benefit of new features. SharePoint 2010 provides significantly enhanced tools for migration from previous SharePoint versions. SharePoint 2010’s new claim-based authentication now allows it to seamlessly support different Identity Stores.
Final Words
SharePoint is a very powerful tool but it will shine only if you use it to its full potential. Here are a few things to remember while working with SharePoint:
1) Don’t dig a hole to swim if you already have a great pool! As SharePoint matured over the years, in general it tends to provide you with more out-of-box features, making them more configurable using browser GUI and SharePoint Designer, as well as enhanced third-party tools.
2) SharePoint dishes are best served on the SharePoint Framework! Work with SharePoint features for what they are meant for. Make use of the framework API’s. If you have to do custom solutions, follow best practices for SharePoint development, so that your data is available to other services.
3) Where is the edge? If everyone is doing the same framework, where is the competitive edge? Focus on the core content, things that matter most for your business. Integrate your intranet applications to manage them from one place. Convert your content to information, make them discoverable.
