While at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, I attended a session on building advanced dashboards with SharePoint PerformancePoint services for 2010.

Overall the demo was good but will say the product has a very Data and BI centric UI. at first you might say “of course it does” but if Microsoft wants this product to be used more widely there needs to be less jargon (Facts, Targets, Formula editing (with no online help) and so on. I think this is a great product and the new features are great but would really like to see a much improved UI.

Below is a summary of the key new features in the product:

- No longer (according to claims) requires knowledge of writing MDX queries)

- 1-click publishing of dashboards to SharePoint

- Works with data also being displayed on the screen and allows for in-line editing of data (very nice!)

- Pretty much everywhere you go in the product, there are live previews of the data. This was a major hindrance in past versions because you really never got to see if the data was correct until you fully published the dashboard.

- if you don’t want to use PerformancePoint’s dashboards you can just publish the KPI’s, charts, etc. To manuay build the page you can go to the new SharePoint BI Center and you can build a web part page (they demonstrated editing the page but suppose SharePoint Designer would work too)

-Bill

While attending the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas I sat in on Bamboo Software’s Project Management tools.

Below is a summary of the session:

-This was a partner-based presentation by Bamboo Solutions and Innovate-e

-Innovate-e showed off some of the new features of SharePoint and MS Project. Applause for creating charts and graphs without the need for using Excel for simple things. A bit more applause for MS Project being able to sync tasks bi-directionally in SharePoint.

-Bamboo’s PM Central fills gaps in SharePoint for Project Managers like data aggregation (think issues lists across multiple projects), improved notification capabilities (let me know when tasks assigned to me are coming due) and build dashboard reports.

- Similar to Project Server, Bamboo allows you to track a resource pool to assign them to tasks, track rates, etc. Note this is a SharePoint-only tool so it does not look like the detailed MS Project Server functionality.

- Ability to search for tasks (which is nice and not really available in Project Server)

- a dynamic report builder allows you to create reports and display them in SharePoint. It looks like there are pre-built report templates as well

- Tools are provided to easily update:
Columns, lists, libraries, notifications, themes, layouts, key performance indicators, etc.

Had to leave a little earlier to help out at the Ask the Experts booth but think most of the key elements are covered.

-Bill

Ever work on a project team when you needed to open up a document with someone in another location and work on it collaboratively? Previously the options were to share your screen with LiveMeeting or WebEx or a web-only version of Google Docs. SharePoint and Office 2010 change this.

I am at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas and took some notes on how it all works. Enjoy!

- Update: these functions also work with Office Online, not just SharePoint

- OneNote: allow multiple people to work on a workbook (client or server) and see changes. A historical tracking view is provided so you can view previous history.

- Word: See pop-up windows in the bottom of Word showing changes being made. Unlike OneNote, you cannot edit the same area. For example, if you are editing a paragraph I cannot edit that until you are done. Change items are highlighted in Word so you can see the changes.

-PowerPoint: Aside from multi-editing, you can even track the individual things someone might do. For example, let’s say you change the border of a bitmap… I would see a list of the changes you made and determine whether they should be added to the final version.

-PowerPoint: Although not necessarily multi-editing, you can broadcast a PowerPoint slide in a way similar to LiveMeeting without the need to set up scheduled events.

-Excel: Multiple people can update cells at the same time in any workbook. All data and charts in other workbooks are automatically updated.

-If you go offline for any reason, changes are synched when you get back online.

- Most all of Office has a web-based version that supports multi-editing as well.

-Bill

Warning: this is a geeky technical post

I just wrapped up a session on developing for SharePoint 2010. Here are some key highlights from the session:

- Problems the new model tries to address: Remove/reduce custom wrappers and non-standard web services

- New for the Client Object Model are simple API calls for adding, retrieving and managing data in SharePoint.

- Where applicable, provide a developer experience that is comfortable for Silverligjt, .net CLR and Javascript.

- Supports synchronous and asynchronous calls

- Supports LINQ for querying data. You can request just the data you need rather than receive all data (for example, request data in a list with specific fields). CAML is still required for some things but it was not ear where one technology starts and another finishes.

- Very simple to build user interface extensions to the SharePoint site. An example was to use Jquery to build a Javascript extension to a SharePoint site using the Trontastic UI.

- Tiny Client API downloads of <1MB (compared to 35MB previously)

- Silverlight application deploymet is supported by adding a SharePoint deployment project to your Silverlight app. Can be deployed as a sandboxed solution to a site so you don’t need to run it against the entire server. Out of browser support is provided as well.

-Bill

While here at the SharePoint conference in Vegas, I attended a session on scaling SharePoint to massive multi-million records.

From an enterprise perspective this is very important to track any company data. From a Project Management perspective, we will want to find best practice documents, find knowledge that can help our projects and even standardize on documents.

Here are some key features that make SharePoint more scalable and new capabilities for the users:

- Microsoft is recommending a new business-focused role called a Content Steward that manages content meta data, retential policies, archiving policies, define indices, etc.
- FAST Search and SQL2008 remote blob support enables hundreds of millions of documents to be searched and indexed
- Users now have the ability to easily search, filter and dril-down to data
- Documents can have keywords and there is a type-ahead feature that finds similar keywords
- Virtual folders let you see pertinent data that does not contain all the records. An example shown was a virtual folder of a sales person that wanted to see certain documents for certain products in a certain region
- When a document is moved to an archived folder, a link is retained in the source folder where the original existed
- Enterprise Content Services manages content types to manage policies, keywords, security(?), etc

There was quite a bit of information shown here and I had to put this blog together very quickly so hopefully you found this helpful.

-Bill