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This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference Las Vegas 2009, Speaker: Ethan Gur-Esh.

Trends By 2013 more that 24% of content that workers see in a day will consist of pictures, video, audio or hybrids of the three plus text according to Gartner.

Rich media scenarios

Media re-use: Brand management This is basically about your best assets, managed, protected and so on. Informal sharing or re-use: like a screenshot, a diagram, things that everyone may use.

Media publishing: this is about where media is really the message. Video delivery, on demand learning, informal video sharing and re-use. These are relatively professionally produced. The sharing part is more about how to capture the video and how to share it.

Rich media in 2010: the first group is around storing and serving media. That can be done through the asset library template. There are also infrastructural enhancements to be able to handle rich media. The second group is about using rich media: media web part or field controls in SharePoint like a media player. Second to that: media discovery and re-use in Office.

The asset library: it has been optimized for digital assets. It now has thumbnail centric views, metadata extraction for images and RSS/podcasting support. On the other side it is still a document library. The presenter shows that you can select tags to narrow down the assets in the library. When you hover over you will get a nice overlay with a larger version, and the ability to rate the asset. For videos you can actually play them cross browser where you have used Silverlight.
When you drag and drop items from your desktop to your asset library, the keyword will be extracted automatically. There are few new content types for pictures, video etc which are extensible.

Demo: My SharePoint sites

The presenter shows a PowerPoint presentation where he would like to insert video. The file picker that pops up shows a “SharePoint sites” as part of the left navigation pane. The lists you see there are defined by the user. By browsing to a library you can connect a list to Office through the Ribbon. If you do that, the site will be listed as part of the SharePoint sites within Office applications.
The experience is quite similar to what you will experience in the browser. So that includes that you can browse assets by using metadata selections.
Within PowerPoint there are some simple video editing options. Like making it darker or lighter, setting start and end points and framing it the way you frame pictures.

Using rich media in SharePoint

The ad hoc use of rich media can be leveraged by the multimedia web part. You can also incorporate rich media  by using the rich media field control. Finally the content by query web part now supports rich media.

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference Las Vegas 2009, Speaker: Ethan Gur-Esh.

Trends By 2013 more that 24% of content that workers see in a day will consist of pictures, video, audio or hybrids of the three plus text according to Gartner.

Rich media scenarios

Media re-use: Brand management This is basically about your best assets, managed, protected and so on. Informal sharing or re-use: like a screenshot, a diagram, things that everyone may use.

Media publishing: this is about where media is really the message. Video delivery, on demand learning, informal video sharing and re-use. These are relatively professionally produced. The sharing part is more about how to capture the video and how to share it.

Rich media in 2010: the first group is around storing and serving media. That can be done through the asset library template. There are also infrastructural enhancements to be able to handle rich media. The second group is about using rich media: media web part or field controls in SharePoint like a media player. Second to that: media discovery and re-use in Office.

The asset library: it has been optimized for digital assets. It now has thumbnail centric views, metadata extraction for images and RSS/podcasting support. On the other side it is still a document library. The presenter shows that you can select tags to narrow down the assets in the library. When you hover over you will get a nice overlay with a larger version, and the ability to rate the asset. For videos you can actually play them cross browser where you have used Silverlight.
When you drag and drop items from your desktop to your asset library, the keyword will be extracted automatically. There are few new content types for pictures, video etc which are extensible.

Demo: My SharePoint sites

The presenter shows a PowerPoint presentation where he would like to insert video. The file picker that pops up shows a “SharePoint sites” as part of the left navigation pane. The lists you see there are defined by the user. By browsing to a library you can connect a list to Office through the Ribbon. If you do that, the site will be listed as part of the SharePoint sites within Office applications.
The experience is quite similar to what you will experience in the browser. So that includes that you can browse assets by using metadata selections.
Within PowerPoint there are some simple video editing options. Like making it darker or lighter, setting start and end points and framing it the way you frame pictures.

Using rich media in SharePoint

The ad hoc use of rich media can be leveraged by the multimedia web part. You can also incorporate rich media  by using the rich media field control. Finally the content by query web part now supports rich media.

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference Las Vegas 2009, speakers: Scott St. Jean and Charles Ofori.

The online topology is basically a Microsoft managed data center that has a one way external trust to your corporate intranet, data sources and AD through a secure connection. Also you can connect to your external (internet) data sources and users.

The presenter discusses a business case that is about Aviva who moved their collaboration sites, my sites and forums & blogging to the cloud. Aviva is also interested in expanding BI, Social networking and Accessibility.
The day decided to go online to the point where it was live was done in 143 days.
So what did Aviva with their portal? They created their own customized navigation to be able to regionalize it. They also developed a forum web part. Another major thing they did was releasing an application called Aviva day. It basically shows a view of a map. When a user logs on their location is shown as a dot on the map. The highlights are around the fact that Aviva has deployed a high number of customizations. The challenges were around handling large amounts of content in combination with variations. It was not encouraged to use it till the 2010 release. Also a high level of traffic showed that NLB single affinity was not the way to go.

The presenter discusses a business case that is about Coca Cola. The key features they needed was a publishing portal for communications, team sites and user profiles with a custom user profile page. It was important to have SAP integration, blogging and a deskless worker features available in the feature.
The homepage of the portal shows us some rotating highlight controls and news rollup. They also put on an iFrame to show a page from SAP. The profile page is literally using SharePoint user profiles, but the look and feel has been customized. On the team sites they have three boxes. The first box is about training and how to use the team site. The second box is about the most recent changes. On the right box they actually show you my Links.
The highlights are around a high number of customizations deployed. The resulting changes to the service were improved documentation producing a master list of configuration changes. They also introduced a re-drop policy for code participating in the review process.

2007 Supported features, scenarios and customization types

Examples of Customization scenarios: custom developed full trust solutions, purchased third party solutions, one hosted external database, SharePoint designer based customization, pre production test environments.
Key supported scenarios: information worker access to SharePoint features, Deskless worker SKU, Extranet access for external collaborators, service continuity management, internet accessibility to hosted SharePoint environment, SAS70 ISO 27001 Facilities, outsources administration of IT tasks like patching and monitoring and Enterprise or Standard Office SharePoint Server 2007 SKU.
Unsupported features: Inbound email, directory management service, SharePoint Single on, Site variations, Records center, Pluggable authentication providers, Pluggable SSO providers, BDC Based Search.
Unsupported customization types:  custom site definition, document convertors, custom managed path, HTTP modules, Inline Code, Custom COM Servers, Custom HTTP handlers.
Scenarios not supported: hosting customer based data in MS Data Centers, Kerberos constrained delegation, Direct access to servers or DBs, Access to admin UI or Farm/server, Additional web applications, Install application (non SharePoint), changed to db schema, non SSL encrypted URLs, change host names after launch, anonymous access, hosted dev or test environments.

2010 Supported features, scenarios and customization types (April 2010)

New features: Office Web Apps, Records Center, SharePoint 2010 feature set that is delivered out of the box unless mentioned below.
Future features: FAST as a service from Microsoft Online, Anonymous access/internet sites, Project as a service from Microsoft Online, Performance Point services.
Unsupported features: email enabled lists, site definitions and inline code.
April 2010: new scenarios: completely virtualized environment, shorter RTO and RPO for disaster recovery, partially trusted code development by using sandbox solutions feature, improved metrics reporting, customization deployment framework. The latter is interesting. It is about a framework to make sure that customers deliver solutions that actually should work the first time they deliver it to the testing environment. There will be a lot more automation to shrink the time to review the customer code review and are more of a standard level.
September 2010: Future scenarios: claims based authentication, remote blob storage using Azure, integration with IRM, site variations. April 2011: geo distributed design.

The presenter shows a nice overview of all SharePoint features that was shown as well on a Tuesday overview session. All of the features are actually marked as available at Online today, Apr 2010, Sept 2010 or Apr 2011.

Process for customization evaluation

It is required for all customizations: in house developed or third party developed. Customer submit to engineering before coding begins. Provides engineering an opportunity to give feedback. Customers use a provided template.
The customization package contains:
Scheduling information, a deployment guide, rollback plan, solution packages, test documents and results, dependencies list and so on. There are more items that I could not capture right now but the report should be available online.
The process starts with a customer notification on for instance Thursday, one week later the customer delivers code & docs, the 10 days engineering review period begins (SLA), three days later the 1 day request gets reviewed in the CAB meeting, three days later the initial engineer PPE go/no go is, one day later the solution gets installed on the PPE, next a 5 days Customer session begins, at the end of that period the customer approval is required and the engineer review is completed. After that a one day request is reviewed in CAB meeting, within five days the solutions get installed in production.

Common pitfalls
The test environment not build or configured like production. Also, everyone should be committed to the deployment schedule. The proposed solution design to customer with understanding MSO custom code support limitations.

Initiatives underway
Test automation framework (automated code analysis). Customization Development Framework (automating customization deployment). Customization Toolkit (packaging the right assets). Marketplace (certify ISV solutions to make them available to Online Enterprise customers).

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint conference 2009 Las Vegas.

Differences when compared to SharePoint 2007
You can author from within the browser not only Excel. You can now interact instead of view only and you will have the ability to not only use UDFs on the server, but JavaScript OM and REST as well. So in general, high fidelity has increased and editing sheets is now possible.

Web services: Now support editing, parameters and charts. You can now use JSOM to add EWAs to a page, and perform business logic using the event model. REST is about getting data out of the workbooks. No Code, URL based. That includes data (ATOM feed), images (Chart) and HTML (Table for instance).

Demo: sales application

The presenter is using an InfoPath form to enter data about a product (category, sub category, product, quantity sold, price per item and a total). The form populates drop down boxes from a data source using REST queries. When the form gets submitted, the data is transferred to an Excel sheet.

The data about products and categories is stored in a cube (analysis services). InfoPath cannot work with cubes so we have to create a flat view of that. In Excel you can do that with the CUBEMEMBER function to get a list of categories. The CUBESET is used to get all the children under a specific category. Graphically we are currently looking at different flat tables that list all products for a specific category and all sub categories.

Back to InfoPath. Populating the form is about reading data from a data source. The data source is a REST web service URL (_vit_bin/excelrest.aspx/site/doclib/spreadsheet.xlsx/model/ranges(‘rangename’$format=atom)  that is actually pointing to a spreadsheet on a team site and a specific range within that worksheet. So how does it work when you select a category and make a REST call to get all subcategories? It means that you run an action called Change REST URL and next Run a query using a data connection. The change REST URL takes a parameter from the drop down box selected item.

Writing the data back to Excel can be done by InfoPath using rules and Excel Web Services: open a workbook, get a row number, set the value, increment the row number and close the session. The row number is stored in the worksheet, so you get that as part of your rules to know which row in Excel you should store your data in.

The key take away is that you can get data out of a workbook to populate your InfoPath form. The key technology here is REST which is basically an URL that retrieves XML data or an Image or a Chart. You can then use Excel services to write it back again to the Excel sheet.

Demo 2: the mash up dashboard
There is a new web part that allows you to type in data and do some calculations with Excel.  Data validation can be added by JavaScript. The way that works is when you select a cell, the JavaScript takes care of the event and validates the entry.
The presenter shows that you can click on a list with locations and as soon as he clicks on a location, a map shows up. When he selects a range of locations, multiple locations appear on the map. When he clicks on a location on the map, a chart pops up. Actually that is a REST call that gets the chart from Excel services.
EWA controls may be leveraged through JavaScript to get data. Within JavaScript you instantiate EWA variables through a generic EWA controller. Next you attach events for certain EWAs like the event that gets triggered when someone edits data in your grid. You can get the cell and value and row variables through the event and you can start working with that within your JavaScript. Still following? If not, just remember that you can add for instance JavaScript that validates the user entries in a EWA grid.

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference 2010, speaker: Spence Harbar

Let’s start with some definitions:
Multi lingual user interface: the language of for instance the Ribbon changes due to language packs but the content actually remains the same.

Multi lingual sites: the content is translated by a human translation process and a workflow.

The variations feature is an infrastructure plumbing feature to enable multi lingual sites, nothing more. The role of language packs is to provide the user with a translated GUI. The packs are fairly huge and if you are hosting a large number of languages take that into account.

So the planning considerations are basically around: language packs, information architecture (storage design), hierarchy creation, navigation, redirection logic, client language selection and translation.

Information architecture
Design this upfront. Think about storage design, navigation, security, performance, and farm topology.

Site hierarchy
For each language (label) a new site is created under the variation root (most cases this is Home). Each label contains the content for that language. To start with you will have to configure the variations settings: a new redirect .aspx at the root. Next you will have to create the variations labels like en-US, es-ES, de_DE, mobile and so on. Set en-US as source. Next, create the variations hierarchy: sites and pages are created. So when you create a new source page they will get created at each variation site till they get approved.
The variations hierarchy is a process that is in SPS2007 slot and expensive, it runs in process and is basically a top support issue for MS. SP2 introduces the variations fix up tool.

Variations improvements with SharePoint 2010
Reliability: all operations run with Timer jobs. And there are many relationships list schema changes. A modified fix up tool to manage for instance the timer jobs and the core process has improved considerably in terms of memory usage and pause & resume support.

Variations logic
The variation root page that redirects users according to language and cookie settings. Also a master page modifications are needed to support different layouts for different languages. Related to that are the CSS considerations to deal with for instance reading direction.

Demo: setting up a multi lingual site
Configuration: Variation root page, automatic creation (by default it creates site and page variations but we might not want to do that), Recreate deleted target page, Update target page web parts, notification, resources are the new configuration parameters.
Next, when you create a new label you now select the site template language for the GUI (consider to keep that English for support), the locale, which content should be created a hierarchy for (pages, sites etc), and if this is the source variation.

Multi lingual user interface (MUI)
Site can now have alternate languages. Through the site settings the site owner can now select which alternate languages should be available on the site. When he does that, a language selector will appear as part of the Global user menu on the top right corner of your site.
If you create a sub site, a language selector is part of the site template picker dialog.
Users are able to translate words for application specific content like Titles and Descriptions of sites and lists and export that through a resource file, and import again on another site.
Central administration is now available in multiple languages as well, so you can select that the same way you can do on a regular team site.

Actually, to my opinion, the session did not exactly surprise me that much. I had expected more improvements to be honest.

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference 2009 Las Vegas. Speakers: Roberto Taboada, Darvish Shadravan, MS.

Forms drive business processes. It begins with capturing the data with InfoPath forms. Then information needs to get to the right hands with for instance SharePoint designer workflows. Finally the info should be translated into proper and timely action by building a web part portal to present that info.

Demo: procurement application
The demo that the presenter will be giving is about a procurement application called Blue Yonder. From an end user perspective it means that through an online form the user requests a new desktop. The created by field control shows that the username is already filled in. New here are the picture button controls. By clicking on the images of a desktop the presenter orders a desktop. When that happens a external SharePoint List will be queried to get all the desktops. Several drop downs provide a filtering mechanism to select the right product, brand and model..

From the approvers perspective there is a portal that shows the forms like the approval tasks, the forms with their promoted columns and a third web part that shows KPI’s: how many requests, how many rejected requests and so on. The KPIs are updated as new forms come in automatically! On the bottom there is a Excel web app that shows various graphs about requests like requests per user and so on.
The biggest change here when the approval tasks pops up. The approval workflow task is now a fully customized page instead of the regular workflow task page you are used to compared to SharePoint 2007. After the approval a Word document is generated by taking data out of the form and generating the Word document so that it can be taken as a hardcopy offline.

Key components
The application described above consists of the following components:

• Line of business data: use SharePoint business connectivity services to get data from external SharePoint lists.
• InfoPath form: combine product and user input, create requests in form library
• Approval workflows: create tasks in task list, assemble order form in library.
• Requester and Approval portals

Step 1: connecting to Line of business data
There are a number of external SharePoint lists like product categories, subcategories and the actual list of all the products linked through unique keys. These lists are external content types you need to set up using SharePoint Designer 2010. A external content type has general properties like the display name, permissions, operations like add, edit and delete and a data source. When you finally click the Create lists and forms button you will end up with a SharePoint list that is synced to the data source.

Step 2: creating the InfoPath form
A big change is the way you manage rules. There is now a big Manage Rules button that shows you a task pane on the right side. There are many rule types like a formatting rule that can for instance used to hide or show certain sections.
The people picker is now a control that can be dropped on the form and there is no additional configuration required to make that working! But you can for instance narrow down to certain groups of people through options.
The picture button control is very nice and doesn’t need explanation. When you select a product by clicking on an image you actually start querying the data source. There is no preloading of data.
But what is NEW here is the fact that you can now do browser based filtering. So for instance select brand, and the brand filters down the products.

Step 3: approval workflows
The tools to author workflows with is SharePoint Designer. In addition to that Visual Studio is used to generate a custom reusable action that creates the Word document.
The presenter shows how to create a reusable workflow. The best practice here is to associate site columns with the workflow fields that the reusable workflow needs to be able to operate.
Another great thing is the document ID number. Within the site collection every document gets a unique ID number which is a prefix and a sequential ID. Great for archiving as well.

I cannot describe the whole demo in this post but the take away here is that you can build a complete application with just InfoPath, SharePoint designer en SharePoint 2010 providing a number of services including the Business Data Connectivity service.

Step 4: request and approval portal
The request portal actually contains of a page that has the request button which is an image with a link that has a source parameter so that you will get returned to the right page. The page further contains some conditional formatting so that new form requests are shown in bold so that they really stand out.
The approval portal consists of five web parts. One for the tasks, one as a view on the request forms and several others I described earlier. So what the presenter shows is that the web parts are connected. The approval tasks web part for instance sends the row of details to the request details.

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference 2009 Las Vegas, speaker: Venky Veeraraghavan @venkyv MS. @SPSocial = twitter account for the social team.

This session is about what is necessary to deploy My site personal network, Social feedback and People and Expertise search. Just putting the software on the server is not enough to get it going.

The presenter shows the My profile page. The Overview tab actually consists of Ask me About, Recent activities, In Common with you and the new Note board. The Organizational tab contains contains a stacked overview of your organizational hierarchy with you in de middle and colleagues to the left and right of you and the managers on the top.

My site components
The My network, My Profile and My Content are the main components / pages. So how does that relate to Site collections? Actually the My Site contains of two site collections: the My Site host and the My Site. The My site host is controlling the My Network and My profile pages. The My content is controlled by the My site collection. These site collections can now be related to Web applications. So how does that correlate? Basically both site collections are hosted by the same web application. However the service applications consists of EMM (metadata), UPA (user profiles) and Search.

Activity feed
The activity feed is new. It is about an extensible Activity feed and a web part. There are two types: consolidated and published. The consolidated are activities from everything you track. Other people consume this information when they have access to it. Published means that the author decides himself to publish the activity. The way both are consumed are through different URLs. Architectural it means that all of the social data is gathered by a timer job, just like the user profile data is gathered. It will then be stored in a user profile db as activity feed data. Reason for that is basically scalability. On the front end it will be display either by a web part or an atom feed.

For 3rd party supplier the extensibility of the activity feed makes it interesting. Take for instance the activity application like CRM and the type “new meeting”, the template would be “person” has scheduled a meeting with “customer” on “details”.

Profile pictures
Profile pictures are centralized at the My site host web application. The pictures are resizable three ways: 32x32, 48x48 and 96x96. The picture picker is customizable and replaceable to support a companies policy and picture store. There is a powershell command to upgrade your store from MOSS 2007. You can also take AD as the source of your profile pictures and even sync back if configured.

Privacy
Key stakeholders are IT, Legal, HR and business drivers. The top issues are around Picture usage: consent, corporate policy and the activity feed: who follows me, two-way consent. Who can social tag and bookmark? You should need to define an acceptable use policy. What happens when the employee leaves?

Demo: social feedback
This is all about getting feedback through social tags, notes and ratings. These kinds of feedback help to categorize, annotate, promote or retrieve content. At the very basic level it is a 3-tuple: person, URI, feedback.

Scalability
This can become quite large in big enterprises. First make some assumptions, next get an average for tags added per document and how many documents were managed with metadata. If necessary scale up. Co-locate managed metadata, profile and search when possible because of the cross service dependency. So even if the services topology allows you to separate them completely, think about keeping them close together.

Expertise search
You can leverage things like About me, Ask me about and Interests as part of the profile search results. Viewing recent content is a link that builds on top of the activity feeds discussed earlier.

Knowledge mining
Outlook will be analyzed and for instance tags you use will be send to SharePoint. Where are the tags: Outlook 2010, SharePoint 2010. But you can also control this. Like if you don’t want to analyze email. There is also an option in Outlook that is about analyzing and uploading options that need consent from the user. Finally, there is user consent on the server. Like Ask me about is visible to everyone.
Wrapping up: analysis takes part on the client –> then it will need consent both at the client and server –> then it get indexed on the server –> finally it may be queried both at the server and client.

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint Conference 2009 Las Vegas, speaker: Mike Morton, MS.

The core design tenets of Office Web Apps is actually around the familiar Office experience, the high fidelity (layout appears just as intended) and trust (roundtrip from PC to Phone to Web).

Demo
The presenter shows a Word document opened in the browser from a SharePoint site. The nice thing is that it actually looks like PDF although it is Word. It is even pixel perfect in the sense that you can zoom it and it still looks perfect. High fidelity indeed. That includes for instance the Ribbon for editing the document in the browser, the spelling checker including the right click contextual menus. Key take away here is that editing in the browser mimics the Office experience. Type for instance 1. and it will recognize that you want to create a list. Auto correction, CTRL-Z, selecting a column of a table, resize cells etc it is all there right inside your browser.

Let’s have a look at PowerPoint. It is using the PowerPoint engine rendering engine on the server so your PPT inside the browser looks exactly the same as within your Office application. And again it is amazing to see the way it works in the browser. Animations work, creating new slides, select the right layout, even the Smart art works right there in the browser! So if you have a deck and want to make a last minute change, just log on to the browser, go to your SharePoint site, open the document and there you go. No hassle with PPT version differences.

Move on to One Note in the browser. Just like in the regular Office app you will have the ability to create multiple notebooks, create pages, upload pictures and so on. Large images are managed easily. So growing, shrinking of the images, it is all taken care of on the server. The image always looks sharp. In addition to that SharePoint adds page versioning to One Note. Tagging, like you do when you create To do’s out of your list, is supported as well. When you try to load the Notebook into your regular Office App, new sections and page are marked black, like unread items to make you aware of the online changes that were applied. The autosave makes sure that your OneNote book is synced with the SharePoint site automatically.

The last office Web App is Excel. The presenter shows an Excel sheet opened in the browser. Creating formulas by selecting areas of cells works in the browser. Also conditional formatting, charts, KPI cell indicators are supported. Filtering is there and works on the list but also on the charts. Key take away is that it really feels the same as all of the Office apps on your desktop!

Myth: Office web apps are only useful for customers without Office on their desktop?
Office customers benefit from Office across devices: laptop, phone, browser. Take for instance Outlook web access and Outlook Mobile. So that will be the same for the other Office apps.
There are better together features with desktop apps and servers:

• co-authoring,
• powerpoint broadcast slide show,
• save directly to SharePoint from Office Desktop Apps,
• work with others with different versions of Office or no Office at all,
• in place viewing and editing of Office documents while remaining in the browser.

Large files
Presenter shows that a 6MB documents opens basically split second. That means that the server only loads the first pages, not the entire document at once. Reading the document in the browser even becomes faster than offline!

Broadcast Slide show
You can basically take any deck, start broadcast and it will create a link for you which you send through email, type the list of receivers and start the slideshow. The receivers start their browser window and the presentation will play. Actually, the one who started the broadcast is in full control, like if you started a live meeting without all of the hassle.

Myth: Office web apps only run on Internet Explorer???
Presenter shows running examples on Linux Fedora, Mobile, Firefox and even the Nintendo Wii (not sure if that makes sense). For Mobile there is a different version that really renders crispy powerpoints. So what about Silverlight. You do not require it at all. But what if you have it? You will get faster load performance, improved text fidelity and zoom beyond 100%, the text will respect the ClearType settings and you will have smoother PowerPoint presentations.

Myth: Office web apps will replace the desktop apps???
Desktop apps remain the richest suite in the world. Office gives customers choice across a broad range of platforms. Something about the history of Word: started as Word for Dos, 1985 next Word for the Mac, next Word for the Atari St in 1988, 1989 Word for Windows. 1992 Word for OS2, 2000 Office Mobile, 20xx Office Mobile for Nokia, Office 2010 and Office 2010 Web Apps.

SharePoint integration with Office Web Apps
Default click in SharePoint opens Office Web App viewer. New documents: when you don’t have the Office desktop app, it will open the Office web app. Search: quickly view search results with the Office web apps, SharePoint as host for broadcasting slide shows.

Programmability
Word Conversion services: like how to create a PDF from a Word document or .doc to .docx and so forth. All possible through these services.
Excel web API: interact with cell data through this API.

File formats
The Office web apps actually support natively Open XML formats like .docx, .pptx, .xslm, .docm and so on. It will convert the older formats like .doc, .ppt and so on. Almost all documents are compatible with the exception of the following: IRM protected documents, spreadsheets that depend on DDE and view-only documents with track changes.

System requirements
Office web apps are licensed with Office 2010. Office Web apps are a separate install on top of SharePoint. Browsers: safari, firefox, IE running on Mac, Linux and Windows.

Sign up on Office web apps:
http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.documents?aobrp=browse

email: mikmort@microsoft.com

This is a live blog post from the SharePoint 2009 conference Las Vegas by Umesh.

How is a service application used and how does it work?
Features such as web parts use service applications. Actually a web application is getting hooked up to a service application proxy which again connects to a service application. Such a connection can be managed individually or in groups. Typically a user comes in through a browser that will request a SharePoint page. Assume that the page contains a search box. The user types in a query and the request goes to the application server. SharePoint uses it’s own load balancer algorithm to route it to the right application server.

What happened to SSP?
When compared to the MOSS Shared Service Provider we can say that the services still exist but have been unboxed and don’t have dependencies to each other. Also there are a lot more services. And the platform of these services is open and extensible. Next to that there is an integrated administration model, so the Shared Services Admin site is gone and the existing services like Search and Excel have become service applications. The BDC has now become the business connectivity service. So, the takeaway here is that 3rd parties can build new service applications. In total there are now around 20 services, and service applications that ship with other products like Office Web apps, Project Server, SQL PowerPivot (Gemini).
Some of the services will work cross farm like the metadata services. Between farms there should be trust based security. So you will need to exchange certificates between the farms. And finally all services use the WCF foundation to communicate through web services with each other and all services have there own database.

Demo 1
From Central Admin you can manage the services, create new ones, attach them to the default application proxy or a new one. After that you can go to the servers overview page and stop or start services per server. So, how to use the app proxies? Go to the web application page and configure the service application associations. You can also manage that in more detail called the service application association page where you will see the web apps and the service proxies. The default proxy is used by all web apps and by all service apps.
The Publish button is there to publish service apps to other farms and the actual connection type the service app is using like https or net.tcp. For the other farm to discover the service you will have to send a special URL that you can see on the page. You need to have established trusts and users enough permissions to consume the service to make this work.

Managing a service
You can now delegate a service to a dedicated administrator. So now you can have someone who can only manage the search. For most control you can use Powershell commands to create service apps. From the admin page you can create, edit, delete, connect to remote service apps and publish and secure service apps. There are also admin pages related to the search apps like the search dashboard where you can see the search crawls, status etc.
Large companies would probably create a services farm and other farms consume services from that farm. Example: service farm provides search, user profiles, BDC and the farms that consume are My sites, team sites.

This is a live blog post from the SPC09 Las Vegas, speakers Simon Skaria and Umesh Unnikrishnan.
This post is about understanding the principles behind designing a SharePoint architecture and how to accommodate growth.

Topologies
Actually you will need to start designing your logical architecture like consolidated vs. distributed. After that you can build it out to a physical architecture that can scale. Scaling out is for most services nothing more than adding application servers.
On the logical side you should consider for instance isolation. Are there departments that require you to isolate certain services like search?
The regulatory restrictions could also influence your topology in the sense of isolating services as could be your information architecture: where to locate wikis, blogs etc.

Scaling services is about scaling within the farm as much as possible. You will first have to find out what the bottleneck is to identify the application servers that are hosting them and add additional ones. Some services are restricted to the data layer like search. That could mean that scaling SQL might be the way to go. So different service apps that connect to different SQL instances. Usage logging data might be a very candidate for a separate SQL instance.
And finally you can scale out the Web front end tier as well.

The second approach is to not scale within the farm but to have a separate services farm. Or even a separate content farm. In a geo distributed architecture you might want to have multiple services farm for instance to host regional search services. Start actually with the search because that is the most heavy one.

Sample topologies
Small company: one IIS web site for SharePoint services, one for the intranet, my sites and team sites. The my sites and team site share the application pool. Fact that the intranet is separated on app pool level is for reliability. From a physical perspective it would mean two servers both having the web and app server role and one SQL server. How would this topology accommodate future growth? Adding content through new site collections and by adding servers.

Medium company: typical 10-15k users, IT staff +- 10, limited intra-organizational seams and need to accommodate projects. This topology has still one farm. But they do have different proxy groups. The HR Web site may have a different metadata service for employees. So there will be another metadata service that is part of another proxy group. From a physical perspective they have split up WFEs from the application servers. The app servers hosting excel, central admin, user profiles, metadata, another hosting excel, user profiles and metadata, another hosting query and another hosting index. Finally two SQL servers. Wrap up: single farm, isolated web apps, multiple service apps, multiple proxy groups, distinct server roles and they manage growth by adding sites to existing web apps and site collections, scale out by adding WFE or app servers and they might choose to further split out their content farms.

Large company: this company has typically more than 50k users, geographically distributed, dedicated horizontal and vertical departments, there are organizational boundaries, often internally hosted with different SLAs.
The logical architecture in this case has multiple farms, the central services farm hosts all services that are consumed by all the individual content farms like User profiles, metadata, search, Business data connectivity etc. They have separated out the My sites due to the number of users, and the intranet. The main collaboration farm has a number of sub divisions but is also hosting a number of services themselves like Infopath, the Insight services, Access services and Excel services. Between farms trusts are set up.
The physical topology is fairly complex having multiple servers sometimes hosting just one service.  So for the My Site farm has separate servers with the Usage and health service (for instance 3 ones with only this service), index, central admin and excel, etc.
The way they accommodate growth is by adding new site collections, new web apps, new farms depending on SLA, scale out by adding WFEs and App Servers and distribute geographically through multiple service farms. The enterprise services are owned by IT.

Other scenarios: internet publishing requires a different topology. Multi-tenancy hosting.

The white paper for topologies on SharePoint 2010 has been published on TechEd.

Considerations: MOSS 2007 farms do not interoperate with SharePoint 2010 farms.

Large company: