On April 13, 2009, after experiencing a 10% salary reduction department-wide, my CIO friend (serving as the Head of ITS of a large integrated school district) had his position eliminated due to budget reductions and departmental reorganization. His position…and several others…now replaced by a single Executive Director I role. These cuts and realignment project $25M in savings to the company department-wide.

On Dec 01, 2009, a CIO mentor of mine, serving as regional CIO of a large nationally known financial institution, had his position as Regional CIO eliminated due to CEO budget cuts. He described his last week as “hectic” to say the least.  He stated in an  email, 

“My employer eliminated the CIO role (and my job) yesterday. That was a first for me. I thought firms of a certain size always had CIO’s.”

Out…But Not Down

As part of their search for a new opportunity to “take IT to the next level”, these two guys share a similar game plan. They plan to:

• Work on their personal brand. (I recommended they become more active in the blogosphere and twitterverse and
• Stay focused and actively seek new opportunities. (I recommended they take advantage of social networking sites like LinkedIn. It helped me get my current role.)
• Stay in the game and don’t give up.

They are out of work for now…but actively seeking new opportunities. So, please offer any advice you might have for these two leaders. I’ll pass it on to them.

— John

http://www.bretlsimmons.com/

Bret does a great job of mixing video and print within his blog. Go check it out when you can.

– John

I recommend this book not only because it is short and concise, but also because it will encourage your company’s leadership to empower all employees to think (and act) ethically by implementing a simple checklist system of “five principles of ethical power.” 

According to the authors, there are 5 basic principles to keep in mind when creating your company’s ethics policy:

The 5 P’s of Ethical Power:

— John

Last week I blogged about how experience and mentors make great leaders. But virtual mentoring has also allowed me to gain more insight into lessons learned from those who have the battle scars that go along with that experience. One of the reasons I created this blog was to share my experiences in IT, business, and leadership. Lately, I’ve found a more valuable use of this blog…as a place to centralize the massive amounts of advice I collect from leaders who have “been there, done that — got the t-shirt.” 

In their 2003 publication for Western Carolina University titled From Traditional to Virtual Mentoring, authors James J. Kirk and Jennifer Olinger explain the evolution of Virtual mentoring and compare and contrast it to traditional mentoring in today’s society. 

Traditional mentoring is face-to-face communication and synchronous; time and location of mentoring can be an issue; it is all personal touch and communication, can be expensive, and is not recorded so it can be confidential. — (Kirk/Olinger) 

The problem with this approach is that in today’s world of work/life unbalance most IT Leaders are too busy to help.  Although many want to help, few can actually find the time for traditional mentoring. Enter the virtual mentor!

The authors explain that,

“…as society looks to technology as a vital resource in everyday life, virtual mentoring has emerged…” — (Kirk/Olinger)

They also define virtual mentoring as,

“…communication via computer and asynchronous; time and location are not issues; there is no personal touch or communication, can be inexpensive, and is recorded so it cannot be confidential.” — (Kirk/Olinger)

So, how does this relate to me? Well, Wayne Sadin is one of my CIO mentors. (He is also one of the few IT leaders I’ve seen with a social media strategy.) Now, I know he doesn’t have enough time to sit down with me and share a Star Trek Vulcan “mind meld” knowledge transfer of his experiences as a transformational CIO.  Not because he doesn’t care, but because it wouldn’t be possible given the increased demands put on him by the business he runs, Loomis US.  But that doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t keep me from adopting him as my “virtual mentor.”  

Yesterday, I received an email from another online mentor of mine (retail industry) about how he created his company’s IT strategy. Embedded in the body of the email were a link and a personal note – a few simple words of advice from a guy who has turned around many fledging IT departments on a global scale.

And today, I received a Twitter message (a “tweet” as it’s called) from a very well-known senior IT leader suggesting I watch an online video of his recent participation in a CIO roundtable discussion on Cloud Computing. After watching and the video and exchanging numerous twitter messages and email communications, I added him to my list of virtual mentors. See, it’s that easy to learn from others.

“With virtual mentoring, the pool of mentors to which mentees can match is greatly expanded and thus increases the possibility of highly successful mentoring relationships.” — (Kirk/Olinger)

That’s great news! You are free to learn from as many IT leaders as you can. I believe it was Coco Chanel who coined the phrase,

“Imitation is the highest form of flattery.”

But be very careful and selective when choosing virtual mentors. Wayne and my other e-mentors all share the same values that I do. This is key when selecting virtual mentors.  No, I’m not imitating these folks, just their successful business practices. They are some of the few CIOs out there not afraid to share their experiences…virtually.

Virtual mentoring, e-mentoring, online mentoring…no matter what you want to call it, if you post any amount of wisdom or advice online (in your blog, Twitter, or LinkedIn answers) there is a good chance someone is reading it, digesting, and possibly even learning from the experiences of your universe.

 — John

TAC stands for teach, advise, and counsel…key elements of the officer role as defined in the academy’s Leadership Standard Operating Procedures.  The procedures, which are in large part from Army manuals, stipulate that the most important element of the Military Academy leadership environment is the TAC officer. Now, don’t think of a TAC officer as a drill-sergeant for officer wanna-bees. Instead, think of him as a mentor in an officer model which promotes responsibility, self-confidence, and teamwork by assigning candidates to various rotating leadership roles. 

It is the TAC officer’s role in this military officer training model to teach leadership…and its attendant good qualities, which can happen in two mutually reinforcing ways:

• One way is through the “referent power” of the TAC officer, the possibility that young officer candidates will identify with TAC’s and emulate their good qualities.
• The other way is by internalizing the program’s discipline as self-discipline. This happens when officer candidates experience successes in training and they identify with leadership provided by their officers during the course of those successes.

Just like TAC Officer is the key leadership element in the military academy, the CIO is at the heart of the leadership environment within IT. The CIO may not always Teach, Advise, or Counsel, but it is the CIO’s individual application of leadership that guides IT departments to success.

Much like a TAC officer, CIOs also have referent power and influence (especially within IT), acquired from being well liked or respected by their staff. This power is earned through IT successes associated with the leadership provided by the CIO.

Do you as a CIO remember the leadership and guidance you provided on a recent IT initiative? Did the folks in IT identify these successes or failures with your leadership as CIO? I’d like to know. Drop me line when you can.

—John

• Governance, Politics, and Diplomacy with SharePoint: Success Factors Beyond Technology by Craig Roth of the Burton Group
• SP2010 – Still a need for IT Governance, by Dana Berg and John Roe at SpeakTech.com

The first session (SpeakTech) drilled into more of the technical inclusions needed and gave an example around building a SP2010 Governance plan, albeit from an “IT Governance Plan” perspective.

The second session (Burton Group) focused on Governance from a “website umbrella” or theory point-of-view and then gave a very useful slide listing all the things a good SharePoint Governance plan…or Statement of Governance…should contain.

SharePoint Governance definition one: (SpeakTech)

“The set of people, process, procedures, guidelines, and tools affecting the organization in order to maximize the potential for providing business value, reduce risk during deployment, ensure compliance, eliminate gaps in accountability, set appropriate steering of the service, and ensure the solution can scale with growth and increased usage.”

The speaker went on to describe governance as, “…a balance between users and IT; a balancing of IT systems with the Service, Application, or tools users need; with compliance as a foundation…” He also answered basic questions around:

• What is Governance and why do we need it?
• How to Conquer Governance
• Key Governance Considerations in SP2010
• A look at some common business needs

SharePoint Governance definition two: (Roth – the Burton Group)

“Website governance uses people, policy, and process to resolve ambiguity, manage short and long range goals; and mitigate conflict within an organization. Roth went on to explain that, “…ambiguity exists because development teams are often led by unspoken rules…” He mentioned that the inclusion of governance allows you to mitigate conflict – a major value point as it helps to predetermine who wins in an argument before it elevates to a meeting with the business leader. He described the short and long range goals needed as, “…something that optimizes for the organization as a whole…”

While both presentation sessions were very good, I think I took more notes in the Burton Group (Roth) session primarily because I’ve created many detailed IT Governance Plans in my past global SharePoint implementations and I wanted more information from a higher level point-of-view. Roth’s presentation offered that. (I know I’m biased in my note taking, but this was just what I needed. I’ve included more of my notes from that session below:

According to Roth, Governance is not:

• A maintenance manual
• Standards list
• Information architecture
• A rule book
• Management
• IT Governance
• A place to put chargeback information (although place it in an appendix if you must include it in your governance plan.)
• Anything that doesn’t deal with people, process, or policy. Separate these things into a different, more lover level document.

 Governance is:

• Governance provides a framework for the above docs and lists and helps ensure their success. Use a federated model to set high level policy but allow for freedom for other groups to make decisions within your framework.
• Governance describes the “why” as well as the “how”
• The authority of governance derives from executive buy-in which is lost or difficult to obtain for low level details.
• A set of issues that HAVE to be addressed.
• Main audience is owners of SharePoint sites and portals, both the business owner and his/her IT partner. (although IT audience should be considered as the secondary audience, which is often not the case.)
• SharePoint Governance is adopted gradually if the organization has a culture of conforming to website governance.

According to Roth, Governance helps prevent many forms of SP pain:

• Wasted investment in time and software
• Internal competition among similar communication mechanisms
• Difficulty finding info across sites
• Posting of abusive, frivolous, offensive, and legal actionable information

…and SharePoint has proven vulnerable to chaos when ungoverned due to:

• Ease of deployment
• Grass roots nature (placing creation in non-IT hands)
• Lack of multi-farm management
• Frequent overlap with installed capabilities

Creating a Governance plan – a “Statement of Governance”

Roth offered the following points in his session:

• Don’t talk Governance without also discussing compliance. (How you will actually check up on it.) Talk with business folks on policies, risk, internal politics, to create a statement of Governance.
• Include social enforcement in addition to central control.
• Remember a “Statement of Governance” is a living document

Governance Authority:

• Executives…Governance Committee… Owner…Resources and stakeholders

 An example Statement of Governance (SOG) Document Outline: 

1. Introduction
   • Includes scope, problem statement, and relationships to other documents
2. People – a seat at the governance table
   • Includes the governance team members, rotates members via a fair practice to pick team representatives.
3. Policy
   • Anticipates and answers the audience question, “why?”
   • Is like the constitution in that it lays the intentions and directions that processes will attach to.
   • Grants authority and justification for governance processes
4. Process
   • Includes one level of detail drill down on policy that answers the question, “how?”, for each policy
   • Ideally, each process is attached to one policy
5. Measurements
   • Answers the question, “How will compliance be measured?”
   • Answers the question, “How will the effects of compliance be measured?”
   • Step 1 – Benchmark before you deploy SharePoint, so improvements after SharePoint project can be tracked
   • Step 2 – Use surveys or polling to measure policy
   • Step 3 – Use iterations over time to measure process.
6. Timelines – place a rollout schedule in this section
   • Publish a schedule of when new processes will take effect, and desired metrics over time
   • Include time for socializing the Statement of Governance

All-in-all the SharePoint Conference 2009 gave plenty of insights into SharePoint Governance. If you are looking for more information on Governance, send me a comment, contact the Burton Group directly, or contact the guys over at SpeakTech. 

I’ll try to post more later…John

But an SLA certainly doesn’t keep outages from happening. (At least not in my experience.) I believe an SLA is no substitute for good old fashioned failover capability.

Infrastructure level SLAs for cloud computing are still emerging as the market and services mature, but the same is not true at the application level. I’m seeing some A-M-A-Z-I-N-G stuff in the works as my customers are architecting applications at design time with the cloud in mind. Folks, this a very big shift from just taking an existing application and trying to retrofit it for the cloud.

Still, we are still a very long way from the reliability expected from my Financial and Oil and Gas customers in order to move core apps to the cloud.

Here are my notes from the sessions I attended today. Please keep in mind this is me paraphrasing what I saw and heard. This is in no way meant to take credit for the below content as many folks smarter then me are the original gurus behind what looks to be a great version of SharePoint.

Business Continuity Management in SP2010

This session focused on the combination of high availability and disaster recovery that can be achieved in SP2010. It focused on Database Mirroring Support, Search Improvements, Backup and Restore, Read Only Databases, and Disaster Recovery Planning.

Database Mirroring Support

• Can now have a failover database server for enabling automatic failover.
• Support for better database mirroring!
• Mirroring benefits – You always have an active copy or replica of your data; increases the avialibility of data.

Search Improvements

• Crawl Component is now what used to be the Index Server. It is now a service (instead of an actual server role as in SP2007) and no longer stores a copy of the index on its server.
• SP 2010 no longer has dedicated roles tied to the server anymore. You can place service applications on any servers. (This seems to be a recurring theme in the new version.)
• Search is now a high availability solution with mirror database right out of the box. (This had to be configured complex in SP2007.)
• With larger scale comes greater responsibility
• Query servers now process queries in parallel.
• Asynchronous database mirroring still NOT SUPPORTED for SP2010 Search. Synchronous mirroring is supported. Failover clustering is still supported, but Microsoft pushing synchronous mirroring as the average DR config.

Back Up and Restore

• Based on SQL Server backup and restore
• Ranges from backing up entire farms to just individual databases.
• What’s New?
  • Support for backup and restore of farm config settings
  • Can back up your customizations if packaged and deployed as a solution package…aka “.WSP” (This is cool and eliminates risk!)
  • IIS host header bindings
  • Timer jobs
  • Can backup multiple SQL server Database files
• Backup size supported is only <200 GB using SP tools offered OOTB. For Anything bigger in size, Microsoft is pushing Systems Center Data Protection Manager (aka…DPM)
• SQL Server backups do not back up full farm configurations because some files are still stored on the file server.
• Site collection now backs up as a .BAK file and is stored on the file server.
• SQL backup only deals with backing up SQL databases. This means Service Applications running on the servers or things on the server are not backed up using SQL backup. Need 3^rd party tool.
• Granular backup is finally here! You can now browse an offline database and browse its content. From there you can export a site collection, site, lists, etc.
• Unattached restore can take snapshots of your database in order to restore without attaching the database to SharePoint. This improvement allows you to take content out for examination or restore.

Read Only Database Support

• Support for marking a database as read only database. This locks the content in the site collection from writes and edits. Think of the uses for this!
• The only issue is that when you mark a database as read only, that DB is no longer participating in mirroring.

Best Practice – Stated in many presentations…Configure more than one machine for each of the service applications.

Best Practice – Custom code or changes should be implemented as a packed solutions file (.WSP) in order to be backed up.

Best Practice – Use unattached databases to restore Site Collections, Sites, Lists, and Docs (OM)

Advanced PowerPivot…aka “Gemini”

This session focused on the PivotPoint client and numerous excel formulas that can be used to filter and report on data, basically taking EXCEL to the next level.

• The presenter retrieved over 3 million rows of data in a spreadsheet.
• I found out that PowerPivot uses a compression algorithm that is column based and not row based like traditional result sets. This is how Microsoft can speed up the query and results. The client composes data into highly compressed columns to find patterns…not the same as data mining – works along side data mining solutions.
• Only limited by the amount of memory on your machine
•  Accessing and importing data from Reporting is a great way to get data into PowerPivot.
• The PowerPivot client and PowerPivot datasets is a read only environment. If you want to change the data, you have to export the data as an excel services workbook.
• Like most BI, PowerPivot is good for aggregation
• Results and calculations – PowerPivot sums on the entire table object and keeps it in memory.

Planning, Deploying, and Administering Excel Services and PowerPivot in SP2010

This session picked up on the PowerPivot conversation but focused on the relationship between Excel Services and PowerPivot from the server side…as well as the integration points and pains.

• The product is so new that the best practices are still being developed by Microsoft from lessons learned in their implementations.
• Deploying PowerPivot server applications and related pieces into an existing SP2010 farms is a complex server side installation and configuration. This is all hidden from the user and makes the “magic” on the PowerPivot client and from within Excel Services workbooks look easy.
• If you choose to deploy PowerPivot on its own server in a “new farm”, then most of the configuration seems to be scripted for you. Else, you have to choose which PowerShell scripts to run.
• The server side of PowerPivot requires two service applications:
  • SQL Analysis Services Mid-Tier Service
  • SQL Analysis Services Engine Service
• SP2010 Central Admin has a PowerPivot Management dashboard that is basically just a webpart page with web parts linked to excel workbooks. The dashboard is for Gemini settings for server/service health monitoring and quality of service from ECS (Excel Calculation Services) web parts.
• In a SP2010 implementation PowerPivot actually uses information stored in the content database(s), Config database, and PowerPivot database(s).
• Unlike Excel Service, PowerPivot does NOT use URL based load balancing. It uses true Round Robin or Health based load balancing due to the sheer size of the data it is hooked to.
• PowerPivot’s OLEDB Provider talks to ECS and uses WCF calls to SQL Analysis Services.
•  

Excel Services 101 – SP2010 Changes

Part of the same presentation above took a look at the Excel Services changes for SP2010.

• Excel Services is a real server. Many customers thought it was just a published excel workbook.
• Excel Services fro SP2010 is now coded as an SOA model service application in WCF for scalability.
• It has a high integration and fidelity with the Excel Client.
• Keeps user sessions in memory on the server – this is controlled by the SP central admin config for Excel service application.
• Excel Services is built ON TOP OF SharePoint 2010. It is now a service application and works OOTB with default settings with little to no config setup required.
• While users requests hit the web front end and a proxy service, the real action of Excel Services happens on the service application called ECS (Excel Calculation Services)
• When planning for Excel Services, the number of ECS servers you deploy depends on the number of users and the workbook mix…plus the delay time the client is willing to accept for results and refreshes…J So, like the other new service applications in SP2010, you can now run multiple service applications per SP farm. (In SP2007 you could only have one per farm.)
• In SP2007, Excel Services is load balanced based on the URL of the workbook. SP2010 uses a round robin model for “Health based load balancing” requests and sessions for excel services
• There are two types of major settings for Excel Service:
  • Global Settings
  • Trusted Location Settings
• Excel Services will only load files from trusted locations. This location can be anywhere in the farm, site, doc library, UNC path, or HTTP location.
• Claims based Authentication – Kerberos is used between SP2010 and the data source if delegating identities. No more need for Kerberos between SP2010 components. Uses an unattended account credentials which are stored in the new SP2010 Secure Store Service (SSS) which encrypts ID.
• External Data (Data Refresh) Setup steps:
  • Must enable Secure Store Service
  • Configure unattended account App ID in Secure Store Service (aka…SSS)
  • Add unattended account to Excel Services
  • Get Workbook author to choose “Server Authentication.”
  • Data Connection libraries are required in advanced security scenarios

 I hope to post more tomorrow…

SP2010 Search Deep Dive

Microsoft’s new search statement: Search is Social

• Social networking drives search quality
• Search click through behavior drives relevance ranking
• Social tagging influences item’s ranking

SP Search End User Enhancements:

• Easier to extend
• Improved “Did you mean” suggestions
• New “View in browser” link (opens item in office web app) for office documents…No more need to download or save as and open the rich office client…although this is still an option.
• Metadata refinement
• Better hit highlighting
• Recently authored content
• New feature – top searches and top searched documents
• Pre-Query suggestions based on what you are searching for…as you type!
• Phonetic search – search by typing what the word sounds like…SharePoint Search will use phonetic and multi lingual comparisons to find your documents.
  (EX: vic kranford will return Victoria Cranford in results, etc.)

Scaling Out the Search Architecture is made Easier

• Stateless Crawlers
• Query servers can run on virtual machines / virtualized
• Multiple Indexers – You can now have index partitions! (Partitioning the Index can allow for mirroring partitions.)
• Crawl Distribution – Componentize the system – You can now have more than one indexer per farm! Indexer is no longer the single point of failure. Can have multiple property databases now.
• Indexer server role is now just a true crawler…it doesn’t actually store a copy of the index anymore. Crawlers partition indexed data and then propagate it to the query servers…no more storing the copy of the index on the index server.
• Search Admin component added
• Search Admin database added
• Enhanced multi-lingual support & synonyms
  • Integrated Language auto-detect now a feature with SP Search and FAST
  • Improved language dictionary support
• Support for Boolean operators for free text queries and property queries
• Improved operator search
• Crawl time significantly reduced (Microsoft beta case study – from 2weeks to crawl reduced down to 4 days…175 items per second crawled at Microsoft)
• Content Distribution – Built in load balancer distributes the hosts over to crawl databases.
  • Site Admins can tell crawler what content to search and ignore; admins can set up crawl rules so crawler only crawls content covered by that content database.
• Query Distribution – Distribution by a hash of the Document ID
• Industrial Strength Resiliency – a search machine down doesn’t result in crawl downtime…now have the ability to add multiple crawlers each targeting different partitions across the enterprise
• Search security – Item security is grabbed at the crawl time for SharePoint content. Security trimmed.
• Still need to write a custom security trimmer for non SharePoint content

Additional Search Enhancements Based on Microsoft Responding to Customer Feedback:

• Support for full regular expressions in crawl rules
• Native support for case sensitive repositories
• Ability to prioritize the content sources so as to distribute the crawler’s resources
• New configurable “Crawl Policy” to define how crawler treats error conditions it encounters.
• Low indexing downtime as it runs during search backups

SP2010 Search Extensibility Enhancements:

• All out-of-the-box search web parts are public and not hidden and easily extended (you weren’t allowed to mess with these in sp2007 as they were hidden)
• Query Federation! – can now bring in external search results into SP2010 Search
• Inline caching – for caching search results in server memory better for faster results.
• Can now search through BDC connections using the BDC model file
• New Search Connector Framework Enhancements:
  • Support for searching attachments and BLOBS!
  • Better Item level security
  • Richer crawl options
    • Time Stamp based incremental crawls
    • Can crawl CHANGE logs and DELETE logs now

SP2010 Deployment and Manageability:

• Deploying SP Search gets easier through better Farm configuration wizards and setup configuration wizards.
• Search now has its own management and monitoring dashboard to show system status, content source views, and monitor what search is doing – the inner workings.
  • Consolidated Admin UI Dashboard
  • Using Powershell, everything in search setup and deployment is now scriptable with over 500 OOTB scripts
  • Views of errors by breakup / error type, etc.
  • Filter dashboard results by content source and transaction type to get an idea of how much time is spent when doing crawls. (Finally answers customer question of “how long are my queries taking?”)
  • Finally! A view where query time is spent to figure out bottlenecks.

Best Practice

• Low query latency can be achieved if all indexes partitioned in equal size
• Remove search system bottlenecks through scale out

Advanced Services and Topologies:

I didn’t get much out of this presentation (I think the speaker didn’t have global deployment experience and was just talking to the slides.)

Principles behind designing a SP Architecture

• Flexible Deployment model – support for more deployment models that the old small farm / medium farm / large farm topology published by Microsoft
• Scales further due to everything now a service (SOA model)
  • Each Shared Service Provider (called an SSP in 2007) upgrades to a 2010 services farm with the following example services:
    • A Search Service
    • A User Profile Service
    • An Application Registry Service (for Backwards compatibility)
    • A NEW Managed Metadata Service…and more.
• Improved Security Model
  • Support now for claims based security
  • All cross farm communication now via web services
• Simplified Admin model
• Services Isolation – Services can now be configured to use different database and app pool…cool!
• Multi-tenancy model – companies can now host SharePoint in an ASP type model
• Scale is the most important physical aspect of a SP Architecture
• Next important is link latency
• Next important is Directory Architecture (ex: user profiles synch to AD)
• Upgrading will require a phased hybrid approach

Document Management Deep Dive:

• Microsoft strategy is ECM for the Masses…The changing face of ECM (Enterprise Content Mgmt) includes the user experience, social networking and collaboration, and traditional document mgmt.
• 3 ECM tenets – Easy to use, Everyone participates, Enterprise ready…scalability…easier to manage…Breadth across repositories.
• Sp 2007 was about the content type…but SP 2010 is about Content Type Syndication…where content types can be utilized via hubs to share and manage content across farms (finally, in sp2007 the content type was limited to the site collection and it took lots of custom code to synch / copy them across the farms.)
  • Many site collection Content Types can be grouped into ‘HUBS” which allow them to act as one logical site collection.
• NEW – OPENXML
• NEW – RBS…Remote BLOB storage…Sp 2010 and SQL 2008 R2 will support external storage of blobs (binary large objects) configured per content database.
  • Benefit is better CAPEX for large scale deployments greater then 5TB storage.
• NEW – CMIS Support (Content Mgmt Interop Servics) is an Emerging Interop Standards by Microsoft and 17 vendors
  • Enables apps to target one or more ECM repositories uniformly across the enterprise
  • Rationalize the interoperability story between repositories across the enterprise
  • Support for REST and SOAP
• NEW – Document ID – Documents stored in SP 2010 now have document Ids that move with the document across the enterprise. (finally)
  • Can now move, copy, or move and leave a link in document libraries and fileshares.
  • Office web app -à so you do not have to download and open in rich office client. Can preview office documents without needing to download. (this can be turned off per document item if security warrants.)
• NEW – “Content Organizer” moves documents around the environment based on metadata, can now move between different sites.
• NEW – Managed Metadata Services (enhancement requested by top TAP customers)
  • Metadata driven navigation OOTB (Finally!)
  • Can be consumed by multiple farms (I spent thousands of hours creating the same functionality for a recent project…now this is a feature OOTB in SP 2010.)
• Multi-stage retention policies can be applied to documents
• NEW – Content type synching across farms now enables central management of a distributive records archive.
• NEW – ability to group document into a “Document Set” (think folder ++)
  • New objects to manage documents as a set
  • Guides users through what used to be a complex process
  • Manage related work products, no matter the file type now as a set.
  • A foundation for document assembly

BEST PRACTICE – collocate the profiles, search, and managed metadata services close together on network where possible.

My Sites and Social Networking

• My Sites Privacy policies and Governance whitepaper coming (Microsoft)
• Profile pictures are a big deal in SP2010 MySites
• Must work with your AD and Identity Management teams because mysites now use a picture picker and store pics in a central picture library per enterprise AD.
• Images are resized by sharepoint in 3 ways:
  • 32×32 for SP use
  • 48×48 for Ad use and client apps
  • 96×96 for user’s profile page
• Mysite use something called a Bookmarklet instead of 2007’s “My Links”
• Mysite has its own site collections (2) and web application
• Mysite uses the following services application proxies (think SOA):
  • EMM Service
  • UPA Service
  • Search Service
• NEW – Mysite uses Activity Feeds for social content:
  • NEW – Social Database
  • User Profile Database and change log database
  • Extensible Enterprise Activity Feed…can create custom gatherers for activity
  • Web Part
  • Atom 2.0 Feed
• There are two types of activity feeds in SP 2010:
  • Consolidated – feeds of content that only you can see
  • Published – feeds of content someone else in the org give you rights to see

I hope to post more tomorrow.

Overview & Keynote address by Steve Ballmer

Basically much work behind the scenes went into making the keynote presentation and SP2010 overview quick demo a success.

 Overview for IT Pros

There are a lot of new features that directly address many of the key pain points and opportunities that we have met over the past 3 years of SharePoint implementations. In particular:

• The new search has built-in faceted searching, tightly integrated into the SharePoint interface.

• A document rating system is built-in to document libraries and the ratings become part of the relevance ranking of search results.

• The search platform allows integration between structured and unstructured content.

• Visio services are directly integrated into SharePoint, which allows Visio diagrams to become one option for an interface into SharePoint content.

ECM for the Masses – Changes in SP Records Management

1) A filterable metadata picker that allows users direct access to enterprise taxonomies. It appears that it will be much easier to create a filtered list of metadata values (filtered by site or library) such as we have long thought about doing programmatically. In fact, the new version may have this functionality built in.
2) The new version has built-in media streaming, cool.

Microsoft BI Vision & Strategy

BI for everyone…Something called PowerPivot for SQL and PowerPivot for SharePoint – A compression technology that allows Excel like views with over a million rows to show support for large lists and libraries and datasets.

Something called “Slicers” which are improved easier ways to allow end users to create advanced pivot tables that are basically tiny SQL analysis applications running in SharePoint.

 Web Content Management changes in SP2010

A document rating system is built-in to document libraries and the ratings become part of the relevance ranking of search results. Ability to manage multiple documents at a time, finally documents get a real Document ID like in Documentum…Numerous changes to Taxonomy and content types in SP2010 making this a real challenger to Documentum and FileNET implementations. Still, with much coding to do to get it to work, a hybrid solution is still recommended.