itaysk

It’s Tech-Ed time at LA, and there’s some pretty interesting stuff going on there..

You can watch the Keynote here: (it’s about 2 hours long!)
http://www.msteched.com/online/channels.aspx?cname=track&channel=Keynote

The News:

First and foremost - You can now sign up (or at least request) for Office 2010 Technical Preview! (about 16 minutes into the keynote)
Office is opening a TP program in July. Everyone can request an invitation, but not everyone will be answered.
Signing is through a new site that includes a cool Office 2010 promo:
http://www.office2010themovie.com/

Some more interesting stuff:

• There were some short demos of Office 2010. (Outlook gets a ribbon:-) ) (about 33 minutes into the keynote, and again at 100 minutes)
• Win2008 R2 has built in OCR! I wonder how that’s integrating with SharePoint 2010. (about 93 minutes into the keynote)
• File classification Infrastructure – I haven't completely got the concept of it, but it seems useful. (about 90 minutes into the keynote)

-- My name is Itay Shakury and I’m a SharePoint Consultant --

Ever wondered why SharePoint 2007 has a built in content type called “Dublin Core”?

From Wikipedia:

“The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organization providing an open forum for the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models…  The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross-domain information resource description. It provides a simple and standardised set of conventions for describing things online in ways that make them easier to find” 
”The Simple Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) consists of 15 metadata elements:

1. Title
2. Creator
3. Subject
4. Description
5. Publisher
6. Contributor
7. Date
8. Type
9. Format
10. Identifier
11. Source
12. Language
13. Relation
14. Coverage
15. Rights ”

Actually I was already familiar with DCMI, but I thought it would be a nice fact to know about.
For more info on that subject visit: http://dublincore.org/

-- My name is Itay Shakury and I’m a SharePoint Consultant --

Today the SharePoint Team has announced that IE6 will no longer be supported in SharePoint 2010!

A bit about IE6’s bad reputation:

IE6 has always been the most hated piece of software around. It has lots of bugs, security issues, instability issues, doesn’t fully support modern web standards and the list goes on.
There was even some campaigns out there trying to get people not to use IE6 (stopIE6, bringDownIE6).

Despite all of the above IE6 still enjoys a fair market share even today when there are already 2 newer versions of it.
The problem goes deeper in businesses and organizations when IE6 is mandatory, most likely due to legacy web apps that doesn’t play well with modern browsers.

Since SharePoint is at the heart of many organizations, and business needs, I think this announcement has marked the end of IE6.

The announcement address other browsers, and said that are working to increase the level of compatibility with them. This makes sense especially after they hinted about XHTML support, but I don’t think that ActiveX control are to be replaced anytime soon.

Check out the announcement:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

-- My name is Itay Shakury and I’m a SharePoint Consultant --

Here’s the complete lists of fixes\changes in SP2 in downloadable Excel format.
Recommending everyone who works with SharePoint to browse the lists. I have learned about some fixes to interesting problems, and anyway, it’s good to know what problems you can face on pre SP2 farms. (I found the ones regarding SharePoint Designer to be the most interesting ones)

WSS:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/A/3/7A3E2E01-5454-4427-95CB-28CE84523B0A/Windows%20SharePoint%20Services%203.0%20Service%20Pack%202%20Changes.xlsx

MOSS:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/1/F/41F3A698-55E8-40B4-A306-AD6CF1F95394/2007%20Office%20Servers%20Service%20Pack%202%20Changes.xlsx

Office:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/2/C/C2C36159-600C-4EEA-B80A-F988EE7A418F/2007%20Office%20Service%20Pack%202%20Changes.xlsx

-- My name is Itay Shakury, and I’m a SharePoint consultant --

SharePoint SP2 is here, and with it, the pre upgrade checker.
This is a tool that scans your SharePoint farm, and produce a report with all the issues that might be problematic when upgrading to SharePoint 2010\WSS4.

This is very interesting.. Think about it.. this tool “knows” what’s in the next version of SharePoint, and checks if your farm suits with it.

So I ran the tests to see what’s it gonna say. Well, it was mainly informative stuff.. just to remind you what’s in your farm. But still, there were a few points worth mentioning (I kept the best one to the end):

Supported upgrade types

“The current farm supports the following upgrade types:

• Inplace Upgrade
• Content Database Attach”

I don’t see anything about “gradual upgrade” that we know from current version.

Lists and Libraries

From KB 956201:
”The LargeLists rule in Pre-Upgrade Checker will provide information about lists that exceed the default threshold for large lists in the next version release of Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

Apparently there is a default threshold for list size in the next version.

Customized field types that will not be upgraded.

“A field type using custom Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) in itsRenderPattern element will not be upgraded as an XSLT-based field type. Fields based on this custom field type will be rendered without any custom formatting in Windows SharePoint Services 4.0. The following field types will not be upgraded:

• HoldsField($Resources:fldtypes_holds_name)
• HoldStatusField($Resources:fldtypes_holdstatus_name)
• HTML(Publishing HTML)
• Image(Publishing Image)
• Link(Publishing Hyperlink)
• SummaryLinks(SummaryLinks)
• LayoutVariationsField(Variations)
• ContentTypeIdFieldType(Content Type ID)
• BusinessData(Business data)
• TargetTo(Audience Targeting)

It is highly recommended that you manually upgrade all custom field types to the new XSLT-based field types in order to have full rendering and customization support. For more information about this rule, see KB article 956451 in the rule article list at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120257.”

This is the most interesting rule, since it gives us a real insight about a new WSS 4 feature: XSLT-based field types.

Apparently, custom field types will no longer base on CAML markup for rendering inside list views, but on a new XSLT based rendering instead.

This might suggest that the entire list view web part will no longer base on CAML, and will be replaced by something more like the XSLT Data View that we already know.

Mysteriously, the KB article 956451 is not found anywhere, but some early posters seem to have got a glimpse of it. Searching KBAlertz suggests that it was recalled by Microsoft…?

Anyway.. That’s what got my interest about pre upgrade checker.. hope to hear more about the next version soon.

-- My name is Itay Shakury, and I’m a SharePoint Consultant --