Many sites and blogs already reported the new, but I’m posting it anyway since the buzz has been confirmed and it’s exciting:

SharePoint 2010 release date has been confirmed: launch date May 12th and RTM in April

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/03/05/sharepoint-2010-office-2010-launch.aspx

As I reported on one of my first posts about SP2010, one nice thing that has been implemented within the new User Profile Service Application, is the presence of the Organization Profiles.

I was browsing for some info about it (since today I was discussing on the usage of this component with Marco Rizzi); there is not yet much information around this topic and I came across this post by Peter Gerritsen which reports some nice information.

The whole idea is to have a new type of Profile for “Organizational” needs: Using the Organization Profile (and also beeing able to extend it using Using Sub-types) this feature can be used in order to create several type of organizational aggregations, depending on your company needs. In example: Divisions, Departments or even Legal-Entities (in case of a multi-company group).

Main issue when you were implementing this using Moss2007 is that all your hierarchy logic was build around the “Manager” property of users, but: what happen if your manager change job, and your office or department do not have a new manager assigned in time? Or what if a manger have two different role inside two organizations? You’ll end up having a broken/unclear hierarchy.

This component try to address this need.

Every organization can have defined who is the “leader” of this organization and who are the members.

Members can be included also by automatically include direct reports of the leader so based on the company hierarchy.

The members could also be associated by ActiveDirectory groups.

The nice nice thing about it is… that you will need to develop all the UI and end-user functionality by yourself 🙂

As far as I found so far, currently there is no any impact on the User Profile page and this information, although present, won’t be displayed. Peter in his post refer that MS did not make it to complete this feature since it has many different interesting approaches and evolution path.

As always, what we can do is to leverage on this infrastructure to build our logic if we need to include this type of information. The Object Model exposes all information from the class Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.OrganizationProfile 

As far as I analyzed it. It is currently not that stable yet: some components do not work 100% correctly, but we know it has not been release yet (so there is always time for some bugfixing)

HTH

Alberto

As far as I know, this will be the first SharePoint Saturday held in EMEA Region.
This formula of events held on Saturday, is pretty famous in the US, but not as much in Europe. We’ll see how it goes.
This version is an online one. It wouldn’t have been possible to organize an in presence event like it is for the SPSatrurday in the US.

Though, It would be nice to have one in italy too. Claudio Brotto, one of the italian mvp, is already a speker of the current emea chapter.

Follow the buzz on twitter: #SPSEMEA

I’ll be joining online sometime on Jannuary 23rd, 2010 (there’s a conflict with the italian UGIAL.NET 5th conference, which for the second time is on my own company’s offices).

We’ll see how it goes.

As I posted on this “warm-up” post I am running my personal blog using Telligent Graffiti CMS, main reason: I like telligent’s products and approach, and I wanted to test this product of them on my shoulder.

I am very happy about it, set it ip and customezed it very quickly; the bad thing is that its future is not clear yet (is it sometime it is not updated). Anyhow, for the time been, I keep using it and sometime I need to implement some changes.

This time I wanted to stop Google analytics, which I implemented on the site, to track my own site access (or generally speaking, any access from an administrator)

To accomplish this, I found this article by google “How do I exclude my internal traffic from reports?” , which reports how to set-up a custom filter to exclude traffic coming with special conditions.

Among this, there is the option to set a variable, using a JavaScript call

pageTracker._setVar(‘siteadmin_access’);

This variable is set within the Analytics cookie, which last for some time (but since cookie can be reset, I wanted to be set for all admin sessions)

Having understood that, I then needed to define how, within Graffiti CMS, to execute this javascript call: it needs to be executed only from the users which I wanted to exclude.
I then went through the “Graffiti CMS” official documentation (read: I went through someone else code to find out stuff similar to mine 🙂

The result is the following: to modify the layout page of the theme you are using (in my case SleepyBlue) which can be found here: Home > files >themes > SleepyBlue > layout.view

On the bottom of the page, befor the </html> closure, I added the following code:

#if ($macros.IsNotNull($user))
#if($macros.CanViewControlPanel($user))
<script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._setVar(‘siteadmin_access’);</script>
#end  
#end

Note: Since this call needs the pageTracker object to be instantiated, it require the Analytics call to he executed before.
Within Graffitics CMS, there is a specific call to include a generic analytics plug in, which is:

$!data.Site.WebStatistics

This call, in my customized-theme case, is called within the <head> section of the page.
(if you’re wondering where the Goolge js need to be defined in graffiti: go to the “Control Panel > Site Options > Settings > Web Statistics”)

Now all I needed to to, is from the Analytics Settings to create a filter:

From the Analytics Profile, add a new Filter.

Using IE8 Developer Toolbar, I verified that the cookie was corretly setup

As you can see, the cookie expires is in two year 🙂

HTH,
Alberto

This year ended with a good news: I will be speaking at the #SPOC2010 Microsoft SharePoint & Office Conference, scheduled for 9-11 March 2010.
It is a real pleasure to be there among the twenty speakers of the conference.

I will be presenting a session dedicated to the new social features, which are pervasive within many of the new functionality of the next version of SharePoint; my session’s mate will be Marco Rizzi with whom I am sure we will bring a lot of knowledge on this.
Nowadays you don’t develop “social applications” in the enterprise just because it is fancy or it is fun (even though it is more fun than developing standard applications 🙂 ). Most of the application that are currently been developed, or that are already in use, can leverage social functionality to connect people to people, colleague to colleague or employee to partners, so that the interaction between people is more effective and productive, and produce more relevant shared information.

More details to come 🙂

This is the official site: http://www.sharepointconference.it/

See you there!

I am trying to reorganize my mind after this full-immersion of brand new contents that have been presented during MS SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas.

It’s not so easy during these tough economic days to be able to participate to conferences like this. Fortunately I was able to make it.

The overall comment about SharePoint 2010 is that it really rocks!! I think MS included most of the highly demanded missing feature to bring the SharePoint platform to the next level. I currently like most of the architecture and new feature implemented. Though I would need some time (quite a lot to be honest), to evaluate them fully since the platform is even more huge.

I also noticed some things that I already do not like, but let stay positive in this post (they might even decide to complete them on next builds 🙂
 

I tried to put down some of the things I appreciated most, but it started to be a very log list and a long post. This then won’t be a fully comprehensive post of all of the new enhancements, but only some of the stuff I liked most.

For a full list of feature, I forward to some official sources [1]
Below you can see the map of all the main features:

SharePoint Foundation

The overall architecture of the product has been enhanced. The most evident feature which to me bring benefits are:

• Revised and more Fluent UI
  all the UI has been reviewed, making the platform far more intuitive than the previous one. Now the interface make use of Ribbons (like for Office), overlay windows and inline editing which provide a very consistent user experience
   
• Wiki edit mode EveryWhere
  Wiki is implemented in every web page, making it possible to edit on the fly a page, like it to others using the [[ ]] sintax, which now implement an autolookup mechanism in order to reference pages and objects.
  This also allow selection and reference of all the content present on a site, allowing for instance to include on a webspace a chart image coming from another report page
   
• MetaData EveryWhere
  Now it’s possible to define several type of MetaData, which can be use to implement taxonomies or folksonomies, navigations, and further enhance social feature around interests and experts.
  MetaData can be defined at Enterprise level using the EMM (Enterprise Managed Metadata), in order to provide a common way to structure information architecture; this can be defined to provide specific tag-set on specific sitecollection, webapplication or also to be shared among different Farms.
  The use of personal tags is available.
  Automatic Tagging is also possible through the definition of specific rules on libraries
   
• Cross Browser support, Multilingual interface and WCAG 2.0 support
  this should further facilitate development of SharePoint application, which in some circumstances weren’t just worth it due to the complexity of implementation  of those function. Now they are build in on the platform.
   
• Office WebApp
  Be able to open a word document online, without the need of downloading it first; or also edit it online simultaneously with other colleagues, it’s just tremendous.
  Excel Services also looks promising, and better implemented this time 🙂 Most importantly, their information can be easily be used as source for web content or to be integrated within other processes
   
• Document Management
  Also this part of the product has been enhanced; most important feature include the new type of item, the Document Set: this allow to create a group of document as a single consolidated atomic work product. This allow to mange the Document Set with all of the other feature (tag, comments, move, approve, etc). Enhanced Record Management and Document routing feature are also provided

Social Feature

• Tagging, Commenting, SocialBookmark and Rating
  This was one of the most awaited feature (and one of the most implemented custom on Moss 2007) It fully leverage on the Metadata Infrastructure and provide tagging and commenting of both SharePoint content and also external web site comments.
  It can be used to track content both for personal future retrieval and for sharing the content with colleagues which can both track a single colleague (and see what he is tracking) and follow directly a tag (hence seeing everything  is tagged using that specific term).
  This widen so much the possible implementation of solution leveraging these features.
   
• Colleague Activity Feed
  It is now possible to track activities which our colleagues do within the platform; this includes tagging and commenting of content. More importantly, this can be customized to implement custom activity tracking (i.e.: within a workflow, when a user approve a procedure this can be published to his colleagues or a specific audience). 
   
• People and Expertise Social Search
  The overall Search implementation looks very good. New filter by focus, expertise and other user property are automatically provided and can be customized in order to enhance experts look-up.
  Social feedback is now included in the result relevance computation, meaning the a document with tags or rating gets better visibility on search results
  Phonetic search has been included, so that the platform try to search terms misspelled (this is most important on English speaking implementations)
   
• User Profile and Organization Profile
  The overall user profile has been enhanced; but most importantly a Organization Profile is now been implemented, making it possible to define profile information for Corporate Company or Company Departments (depending on the type of implementation).
  The overall navigation of the organization hierarchy has been enhanced as you can see on the screenshot below

   

Development

On the development side, in my opinion the two most important point are:

• Customization/Development model
  The overall customization model can be re-organized in my opinion. Now the use of SharePoint Designer as customization tool can be fully embraced, since this now implement a way by which export any customization to a wsp package, which can be further enhance later-on using VisualStudio 2010.
  This can now allow quick implementation of customizations and changes on the platform, which can then be managed using an enterprise approach, deploying them properly, storing them on a Software Lifecycle platform (as TFS)
   
• Platform Extensibility
  Now the SharePoint platform seems to be a real application development platform which has been designed to be extended in the future and from customization (in the past, some classes or component were not open to customization, and that made it more difficult or simply time expensive also for some easy changes).
  Now the platform implement a comprehensive set of API, which are exposed through webservices and rest api
   

Also this topic has been enhanced

• Form/Process Services
  I quickly sow some examples of how new SharePoint Designer, along with Visio and Infopath can now be used together to implement human based workflows.
  I will need to better deep down on this point, but as far as I sow, this push ahead the need of adopting a platform like K2 or Nintext (which of course implement fully the BPM approach).

There’s a lot to be better analyzed and understood (including some component which I didn’t had the opportunity to follow like: Composite application, Business Connectivity Services and Mobility support).

I hope to be able to share my findings in the future.

HTH
Alberto

[1] Source of further information:

• IT Profesionals http://MSSharePointITPro.com
• Developer http://MSSharePointDeveloper.com 
• Everyone http://SharePoint.Microsoft.com

The fact is that most of the SharePoint Developers hates it.

It’s at least 3 month from when I rebuild my machine that my sharepoint designer keeps asking to activate it.

Now that I am going to do so:

I’m not going to do that until 3 more month 🙂