My Top Three Favorite Things About SharePoint 2010 SharePoint 2007 has been a very successful product for many reasons. Perhaps it is the good applicability of .NET to SharePoint. Maybe it is the fact that SharePoint gives you so much beyond plain vanilla ASP.NET, that it gets both techies and business users excited. Having been available for about three years now, there has been time for developers to discover a few rough edges to the product as well. And now that SharePoint 2010 is out, it takes off where 2007 left. There are numerous enhancements in SharePoint 2010 over SharePoint 2007. Clearly Microsoft listened. While there are too many new things to mention for a single article, I will discuss my top three favorite things about SharePoint 2010 that I, as an architect, have been waiting for with bated breath. The Re-architected Services Model In SharePoint 2007, specifically in MOSS 2007, there is a concept of the SSP, or the Shared Service Provider. When configuring your farm, you would generally also create one or more SSPs. These SSPs would be responsible for running a lot of background batch-oriented tasks and other frequently heavy-duty tasks. This was great, except there was one big limitation. While you could have as many SSPs in the farm as you liked, and one SSP could manage multiple Web applications; the converse was not possible, i.e., that multiple SSPs could manage one Web application. This presented a significant scalability problem, especially when using resource-hungry MOSS features such as Excel services that had to share the same SSP with other services. In SharePoint 2010, Microsoft broke out individual services from the SSP model and you can configure them independently. Also third-party companies can add services to the platform as well. When you install SharePoint, you get a certain set of services with it. You can see them by visiting Central Administration and clicking the Manage Service Applications link. Breaking these services out of the SSP Model, and the ability to configure them independent opens up a number of interesting scenarios: You can now appoint administrators on a per-service basis. You can do so by selecting a given service, and then clicking the "Administrators" button on the ribbon. These users are then given access to Central Administration. However, they can manage the designated service. You can now offer services to sites on an à-la-carte basis, rather than an all-you-can-eat-buffet style. For example, if a site does not need Excel Services, it does not get Excel Services. The administrator can pick and choose which services are made available to which sites. The third interesting scenario is perhaps the most exciting. Farms can share services. In fact, now you can have an entire farm that can scale out, whose job is to do nothing but provide services to other farms. This opens up immense scalability options, and also a great deal of flexibility in the overall architecture considering things such as security, availability, etc. Now, the more cynical of you might think: What SQL Server permissions will I need to give in this cross-farm implementation? The answer is "None!" Managed Farm Services communicate through each other via proxies, thus obviating the need for direct SQL permissions to the parent farm's configuration or service databases. Having this level of flexibility in managing the services on your farm also enables SharePoint to now function better as a hosted platform. Not only can you now share services across multiple "tenants," you can also partition data accordingly. Imagine trying to share profile information in SharePoint 2007 across multiple tenants? Actually, sharing wasn't the problem, partitioning the data and making sure profiles from one tenant did not interfere with another tenant was the real problem. Well not anymore! | & | | 
By: Sahil Malik
Sahil Malik is a Microsoft MVP, INETA speaker, a .NET author, consultant, and trainer, and a well-rounded overweight geek. He has a passion for SharePoint, data access, and application architecture.
Sahil loves interacting with fellow geeks in real time. His talks are full of humor and practical nuggets. His talks tend to get very highly charged, fast moving, and highly interactive.
You should check out his blog at http://blah.winsmarts.com
sahilmalik@gmail.com |