This day was very much SharePoint 2010 themed. A session about SharePoint governance failed to make a real impression, but was useful nonetheless. I assume that you have a complete and very much alive governance document at your site (erm..). If not, you should start working on that now. On the one hand your end users expect miracles from your implementation and in your governance documents you can write down the promises you can keep. Oh, and that means for every web application of course.
The other thing is that extending SharePoint can also help you automatically keep your SharePoint running, instead of end in chaos. The extensibility of the new Health Analyzer in SharePoint allows you to keep track of sloppy installations or features being installed on your machine. Wouter van Vugt showed how you can go even beyond that fully control what users can and can’t do with features on your site. Interesting stuff, though the code of the Feature Blocker feature might not fully comply with my governance rules.
If you are looking for a way to make a succesful implementation in SharePoint speakers like Wouter van Vugt and Daniel McPherson , I must say I couldn’t agree more, stressed the following points:
- Make sure Search works such, that the user can find what they’re looking for and no, the out of the box solution is not good enough.
- Allow users to do stuff, instead of locking and blocking all SharePoint functionality. On the other hand, make sure that features like the social features are used sensibly.
- Remove friction. Like having to log on again and again. SharePoint 2010 has a fluent UI and you should keep the flow going.
Most sessions I attended suffered from the shorter time slots. Enterprise Content Management extensions can be the essential tools that make the business run like an oiled machine, so it was a pity that a subject like In Place Record management almost got crushed. Imagine datasets with cover pages that allow you to make documents a record with the push of a button. Having a unique document ID across farms is useful, but less impressive. The cool thing here however is that Wouter got to show how to build a SharePoint service. Awesome template.
SharePoint online, or Office 365, sneaked into every SharePoint session. It is really fascinating how powerful it can be (on line around the world Intranet portal) and at the same time how limited it (still) is. Yes you can simply fire SP2010 Designer and do the funky stuff you can do with it. No, you do not have Central Admin access, BCS or fully trusted webparts. At Microsoft they are looking into ways to give access to Office 465 SharePoint services to external (cloud) services. By the way, there is always the option to use Silverlight or jQuery based webparts.