Yammer is now Microsoft's big bet for enterprise social and that makes sense: Yammer gets the kind of viral adoption SharePoint used to have before IT teams got their hands on it, when people were looking for a way to share documents. When they want to actually have a conversation with colleagues and partners, Yammer is where they turn. http://www.zdnet.com/yammer-is-microsofts-big-bet-for-enterprise-social-and-heres-why-7000026956/

Microsoft is "working on migration guidance" as it is building its "next generation of forms technology," officials added in the post, noting that Microsoft will continue to support InfoPath 2013 and InfoPath Forms Services for SharePoint Server 2013 through April 2023. Execs said Microsoft will provide more specifics on the future of Office forms "later this year" and will provide a sneak peek of what's being built at the company's SharePoint Conference 2014 in March. http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-discontinues-its-infopath-electronic-forms-product-7000025844/

 

As I learn, taking notes of some noticeable enhancements in SharePoint 2010 ( in my point of view)

Backup and Restore

• SharePoint Server 2010 uses two different tools (Central admin and PowerShell) to configure backup and recovery. What happened to STSADM? It is still there, for only backward compatibility.  New backup plans should be incorporated with Windows PowerShell in place of Stsadm.
• Windows PowerShell provides administrators a way to perform backup and recovery with additional options such as file compression or working with SQL snapshots
• SharePoint Server 2010 provides several new features that provide a granular level of backup for various components of site content (site, subsite, and list level)

Database

• In SharePoint Server 2010, you can restore site collections, sites, and lists from unattached content databases. You can simply do a SQL Server restore of the content database to any computer running SQL Server, then tell SharePoint to connect to it. This eliminates the need to build a second farm for granular recovery
• It has the ability to recognize read-only SQL databases. Whenever SharePoint Server is connected to a SQL database that has been placed in read-only mode, SharePoint Server will security trim all site collections in the database so that they are read-only to all users, removing all add and edit functionality from the sites, even for administrators
• It supports SQL mirroring natively. This allows a farm administrator to configure the SQL environment to mirror a SharePoint content database. Whenever a new database is created, the SharePoint administrator will be prompted to enter the failover server.

Managed Accounts

• It reduces the load of managing various service accounts. SharePoint will take control all the service accounts we use inside the SharePoint (like changing the password automatically as per the policy or send a reminder when it is about to expire)

More to come…..

 

My first look at noticeable enhancements in SharePoint 2010.

1. Developer Dashboard.

• Determining what part of the system is causing a delay or consuming resources was difficult in previous versions. With dashboard, it records and displays performance statistics related to the code that executed to produce the page (with elapsed time as well as the load placed on the system by queries and tracking of exceptions )
• It can be turned on by the following command.
  • stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv OnDemand
• It is like ASP.Net tracing, so it should be turned on only in test servers , no on production server ( for performance reason).

2. Silverlight Web Part

• To provide rich interactive experience, sharepoint now provides native support to Silverlight files (XAP)

3. Chart Web Part (Only with sever edition, not on foundation)

• Different chart creation webparts are available, like ASP.NET Charts.

4. SharePoint List

• Lookup Field to display fields from another list with the site.
• Lookup field relational enforcement.
• automatic creation of indexes on lists when necessary

5. LINQ support

• LINQ is a new data access paradigm and can improve performance by allowing the back
  end data source to decide the best way to solve the query.

More in the next.