Tuesday, 27 October 2009

SharePoint 2010: Architecture Guidance - things everyone should know!

Martin Hatch, Solutions Architect Well, the final day of the conference came and with it some of the most useful sessions (from my perspective). One of which was the "Architecture Guidance for SharePoint 2010". This hopefully distils some of that information. It's not a be all and end all, but hopefully points you in the right direction so that you can focus your research a little better!

UI Design

Entire interface in SharePoint 2010 to be W3C XHTML compliant SharePoint 2010 "more accessible mode" to be WCAG 2.0 AA compliant New ribbon interface replaces toolbars and menus (and considerations for old "CustomAction" commands which may no longer work!) Wiki content allows web parts to be dropped in (removing over-reliance on web part zones)

Lists
There are a whole load of new List capabilities (in addition to the "External List" that BCS brings to the plate!). Lookup to Multiple This means that when you create a new lookup column, you can now pull down additional fields from the lookup list item and use them for filtering. CAML support for Joins! You can now perform "JOIN" operations in your CAML queries for linking lists together. Enforced List Relationships You can now enforce specific relationships for lookup columns with two options: o Restrict Delete - cannot delete parent if child items exist. o Cascade Delete - If you delete the parent, all child items are automatically deleted (recycle bin aware with "restore" options!) Store-level enforcement This is code level "required fields", so now you can enforce the requirements even through code ! Unique Fields Specify a unique field, so that no two values can match (e.g. Email addresses in contacts list) Compound Indices If you want to query by 2 fields, you can now index both at once as a compound index. <In> clause for reverse lookups This allows a CAML query to do a reverse lookup to get all child items that are associated with the parent! Formula based validation e.g. Don't allow Field2 to be lower than Field1.

Workflows

Out of the box SharePoint 2010 workflows can now be extended in SharePoint Designer 2010. SharePoint Designer 2010 can be used to create "re-usable" workflows Site Workflows - to manage processes across an entire site. You can now import a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow into Visual Studio 2010! Import/Export workflow using Visio 2010 for visual workflow modelling.

Content & Document Management

"Document Sets" allow you to treat a group of documents as a single item (with 1 version history, group executed workflow and policy, and a "download as zip" option). Managed Metadata Service allows cross-farm Content Type management. This is a killer-app, bringing true enterprise content management to SharePoint 2010. Enterprise Wiki's allow more rapid "in edit" content, as well as Web Parts deployed directly into the rich text editor (no more web part zones?). Spelling check and broken link check when you "check-in" WCM pages.

Event Handlers Three new event handlers added (at last!!)

WebAdded - Fired every time a child site is created in the web. ListAdded - Fired every time a list is created in the web. Feature Upgrading - Fired when a feature has it's "upgrade" method called (more on this in a future blog post).

Security

Editing of ASPX pages now required "Designer" permissions (instead of contribute). XSS (Cross Site Scripting) protection for pages and web parts. HTML pages will now "force download" by default. This stops people from uploading HTML files with malicious scripts, so if you click on an HTML file in a document library you will get a download dialog instead of the file opening in the browser! There are still no field level permissions (it was estimated that this would add a 30% overhead to performance! Maybe in a future release)

BI and Connectivity New Business Connectivity Services (BCS) allows no-code connections of databases and LOB systems to content types and lists with two-way synchronisation of data and full CRUD support. PowerPivot for Excel allows upwards of 100 million rows into an excel workbook with phenominal performance. Office Application Support New web level services for applications (Excel / Visio with JavaScript events!) SharePoint Workspace to replace "Groove" for offline file support and editing. Office Web Applications to allow for direct opening and editing of documents from within the browser!

Databases

Still a 100GB "limit" for content databases. Still cannot have site collections spanning multiple databases.

New support for "Failover" databases, SharePoint 2010 is now SQL mirror aware! All "Service Applications" have their own SQL database, along with many other new databases (e.g. Feed Activity, Social Data, Usage Logs). New "read only content databases" open the door for simple content deployment (utilising SQL log shipping or database replication).

Content Deployment

All execution now in Timer Jobs. Performance (and memory usage) improved. Export routine now creates database snapshot to improve data integrity!

Sandboxed Solutions

Ability to upload WSPs directly into the content database to execute in minimal permissions using "virtual files" (no impact on the file system!) Resource throttling, code performance checking and "bad routine" blocking Provides new best practice for code development and deployment!

I'm sure there are many other things, so please let me know if there's anything else you think should "make the grade" and I'll see if I can add it in :)