Key notes from the Keynotes

Martin Hatch, Solutions Architect

The keynote speeches contained a huge amount of content, but there were some standout points for me that were worth condensing into a post...

• One of the main aesthetic changes is that Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is now called SharePoint Foundation 2010. Hopefully more details about capabilities will surface during the conference.
• There was much talk about SharePoint Online. They apparently have over 100,000,000 users and the platform is updated quarterly with new functionality, so we can hope to see new SharePoint 2010 functionality in that creeping through once the RTM version of SharePoint is released.
• The list item storage limits has gone WAY up ... 1,000,000 items per folder/list and over 10,000,000 documents per library.
• Another favourite was how Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 allows you to expose excel data as REST feeds (such as charts, tables, images, pivot tables). This allows you to subscribe to an image URL which is actually being dynamically generated from the Excel 2010 spread sheet. The main focus here was that you can embed this image anywhere that a normal HTML or Office Client image can be placed, but if the Excel 2010 spread sheet data is modified then the image is automatically updated to reflect those changes!
• Other highlights included forcing spelling checkers and broken link checkers on check-in of a page. In fact there was a lot of mention around web sites full stop, particularly 2 new products for websites: SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites and FAST Search Server for Internet Business.
• The new Wiki Editing features were demonstrated with auto-complete URLs for lists, views and folders in libraries.
• For those power users there are also over 500 new PowerShell commands for SharePoint 2010 which will be shipped with the Beta version in November. These can even be run on a Windows 7 machine and executed remotely!

But by far the most impressive part for me was the presentation on SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel 2010. This is the product formerly known as "Gemini" and allows you to pull data in from SQL databases to allow up to 100,000,000 rows of data in Excel 2010! You can then filter, sort and produce charts which refresh near instantaneously! There was a demo of this in the session causing a round of applause from pretty much everyone.

A very interesting session in the end, with glimpses of promise from all over the platform. I can't wait to get my hands on it!

[Also posted on Martin's personal blog]