Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Overview

The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web ^[1]

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products collaboration software provides enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs such as managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling informed decisions.

SharePoint Capabilities

SharePoint Capabilities is divided into 6 categories: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites with more than 40 feature areas.

·         Sites – A “one-stop-shop” for all your business websites, includes team site for colleagues, extranet site for partners and Internet site for customers, where people can share and publish information using one familiar system.

·         Communities – A full set of collaboration tools—from wikis to workflows and team sites to tagging built upon a secure, manageable and scalable platform, establishing an ecosystem over SharePoint Server 2010 that encompass your content, people and learning.

·         Content – A comprehensive enterprise content management (ECM) system combining traditional content management, social capabilities, and powerful search.

·         Search – A single, cost-effective infrastructure helps your people find the information they need through intranet search, people search, and a platform to build search-driven applications.

·         Insights – A business intelligence (BI) solution with powerful features like interactive dashboards and scorecards lets everyone access the business information they need to make good decisions.

·         Composites – provides building blocks that you can use to assemble, connect, and configure collaborative business solutions.

SharePoint Benefits

Benefits SharePoint brings to your organization can be expressed as the abilities of:

·         Connect and Empower People – Make you people work more productive through faster adoption to with the friendly Office Ribbon user interface, improved collaboration with Office 2010 and  a diverse set of capabilities that extends people’s access to resources and allows them to be productive regardless of the tools or devices.

·         Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure – The consolidation of business productivity solutions onto SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to cut costs with lower training costs, increased IT productivity and cost-effective maintenance.

·         Rapidly respond to Business Needs – The ability of creating no-code customization and linking to external line of business applications (CRM, Office, ERP…) enable users to address specific business needs more quickly and more effectively.

SharePoint Architecture

A complete SharePoint 2010 architecture is built up from SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and other client applications. Based on SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server is added with a large number of Service Applications to enhance its functionalities. Customers can also integrate their own services or purchase other third-party add-ons. A rich set of client applications allow user to connect and manipulate data with server through these services.

References

[1]    SharePoint 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=462

[2]    SharePoint 2010: a first look, ZDNet, http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/communication-and-collaboration/2010/03/04/sharepoint-2010-a-first-look-40070576/

[3]    Microsoft SharePoint 2010.pdf, Microsoft, http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/5/F/05FF69ED-6F8F-4357-863B-12E27D6F1115/Microsoft_SharePoint_2010.pdf

SharePoint 2007 vs. SharePoint 2010, http://www.rharbridge.com/?page_id=103

New Features of SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 includes new features and enhancements to current functionality. The following figures show an overall comparison in components between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007.

Some key additions and improvements in each feature area of SharePoint Server 2010:

·         Sites

o   Read/Write Capabilities with Line-Of-Business Integration, with external systems.

o   Web Analytics: collect, report, and analyze the usage and effectiveness of your SharePoint 2010 deployment.

o   Contextual Ribbon, Silverlight – robust user interface.

o   Office Web Apps – edit Microsoft Office documents in web browser.

·         Communities

o   Organization Browser: visualize the structure of the organization.

o   Tagging: helps socialize contents within and without enterprise.

·         Content

o   Document Sets: a content type manages a single deliverable that includes or spans multiple documents.

·         Search

o   FAST Search Service Integrated: crawl, process, and index content, to provide search results for that content in response to requests from protocol clients.

o   Thumbnails, Previews, and View in Browser: many options for viewing in search results.

·         Insights

o   KPI Details: a web part for viewing details of KPI.

o   Chart Web Parts: new web parts that visualize data for better look to make better decisions.

o   PerformancePoint Services: enables you to create rich, context-driven dashboards that aggregate data and content to provide a complete view of how your business is performing at all levels.

·         Composites

o   Business Connectivity Services: based on Business Data Catalog, BCS offers connectivity with 4 different kinds of external systems – web services, databases, .NET connectivity assemblies and custom data sources.

o   Visio Services, Access Services: new services that help connect Office Visio and Access with SharePoint 2010.

o   Sandboxed Solutions: enables site collection administrators to install custom solutions in SharePoint Foundation without the involvement of a higher-level administrator.

Upgrading to SharePoint Server 2010

You can choose between two basic upgrade approaches when you upgrade from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010: in-place upgrade and database attach upgrade.

·         In-place upgrade: the configuration data for the farm and all the content in the farm is upgraded on the existing hardware, in a fixed order. When you start the in-place upgrade process, Setup takes the Web server offline and the Web sites are unavailable until the upgrade is finished, and then Setup restarts the Web server. After you begin an in-place upgrade, you cannot pause the upgrade or roll back to the previous version.

·         Database attach upgrade: you upgrade only the content for your environment and not the configuration settings. Using a database attach upgrade approach is useful when you are changing hardware or want to reconfigure your server farm topology as part of the upgrade process.

You can also combine these two types of upgrade in hybrid approaches that reduce downtime during an upgrade.

·         Hybrid approach 1: Read-only databases - gives users continuous read-only access to their data while you upgrade. The content databases in the original farm are set to read-only, and copies of the databases are upgraded on a new farm.

·         Hybrid approach 2: Detach databases - enables you to speed up the upgrade process by detaching and attaching databases to upgrade multiple databases at the same time.

References

[1]    SharePoint 2007 vs. SharePoint 2010, http://www.rharbridge.com/?page_id=103

[2]    Introducing Web Analytics in SharePoint 2010, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2010/03/21/introducing-web-analytics-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

[3]    Document Sets in SharePoint Server 2010, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee559339.aspx

[4]    [MS-FSO]: FAST Search System Overview, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee629339.aspx

[5]    Plan search service applications (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint), http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg405120.aspx

[6]    What is PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010? , http://blogs.msdn.com/b/performancepoint/archive/2009/10/20/what-is-performancepoint-services-for-sharepoint-2010.aspx

[7]    Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee536577.aspx

[8]    What's New in SharePoint Server 2010, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557323.aspx

[9]    Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee517214

[10] Upgrade process overview (SharePoint Server 2010), TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262483.aspx

[11] Upgrade in place to SharePoint Server 2010, TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263212.aspx

[12] Attach databases and upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010, TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263299.aspx

Business Connectivity Services Overview

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) enables users to read and write data from external systems —through Web services, databases, and Microsoft .NET Framework assemblies—from within Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 applications. Both SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications have product features that can use external data directly, both online and offline. Developers can gain access to a rich set of features and rapidly build solutions by using familiar tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010.

High-level architecture of BCS ^[1]

The following figure shows how to achieve connectivity using BCS.

The major feature in BCS is Business Data Connectivity (BDC) Service that creates ability of connecting SharePoint and Office with customers’ existing databases, their / 3^rd-party Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services, .NET connectivity assemblies and custom data sources.

Each participant in this connectivity (SharePoint Server, Client Applications and External Systems) has a bundle of major components as in the following figure.

BCS major components ^[4]

BCS Benefits

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) offers the following benefits for working with external systems and processes.

·         Read or Write to External Systems – Helps create, read, update, delete, and query (CRUDQ) to the external system from a Microsoft Office application or SharePoint site if the external system supports the operations.

·         Familiar User Interface - Users can work in their familiar work environments without having to learn different user interfaces.

·         No-Code Connectivity to External Systems - Using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, the solution developer can declaratively describe the external system and tell Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 what data he or she wants.

·         Offline Access to External Data - Provides rich cache and offline work features, and supports cache-based operations. The read/write operations performed against cached external items are synchronized when connection to the server becomes available.

·         Governance of External Data - After data from the external system is loaded into Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 by the Business Data Connectivity (BDC) service; you can access the data securely and take advantage of a straightforward audit trail.

·         Discovery Through Search - Business Connectivity Services offers discovery of external data via SharePoint Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2010.

·         Life Cycle Management – Provides a large numbers of features combined with tools (SharePoint Designer 2010, Visual Studio) to implement application life cycle management.

References

[1]    Understanding Business Connectivity Services, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554916.aspx

[2]    Connectivity Using Business Connectivity Services, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556852.aspx

[3]    Business Data Connectivity (BDC) Service, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556407.aspx

[4]    Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010, O’Reilly Media Inc.

[5]    What Is Included in Business Connectivity Services?, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556390.aspx

[6]    Business Connectivity Services Benefits, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556440.aspx