New Details on SharePoint 2010 from Microsoft

Microsoft has released a new site on SharePoint 2010.

In the site, you will find information on SharePoint 2010 for developers and it professionals.

There are some interesting announcements in video format here that are worth exploring.   In the developer video, they show SharePoint integration into Visual Studio 2010.  There are a few new bits in here:

• Manifest editing tools in Visual Studio
• Solution Package Designer in Visual Studio
• New web part editor for Visual Studio
• LINQ will now support SharePoint lists. 
• Developer Dashboard will help by providing diagnostic information when developing web parts in SharePoint.

Will Google Chrome OS Be Any Different than LINUX, BEOS, Network Computer, etc.?

It was widely announced that Google will be releasing a new operating system called the Chrome OS that will be initially deployed to NetBooks but will hopefully compete with Windows on the desktop.

Yawn…shades of 1995 when Java OS, Oracle OS, Network Computer etc. tried to do the same thing.

If you want a OS replacement for Windows on your NetBook, you can get it today – its called LINUX!  Acer, Dell, etc. all have Net Books that will come with LINUX today.  And if you want to run Google’s browser, you can download it for free.

Can you even call Chrome OS a new operating system when you’re just repackaging LINUX?  KDE and GNOME aren’t operating systems, so why is Chrome? 

"The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no Web," the blog post said. "So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome--the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to rethink what operating systems should be."

Huh?  Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS, and LINUX were all designed with the web in mind. 

COREL had the same vision in mind when they created COREL LINUX.  They had WordPerfect, CorelDraw, etc. (even at the time much more sophisticated applications than Google Spreadsheet is today) and they couldn’t sell any more office licenses because Microsoft had a lock on the desktop and was killing them in the office market.  So they made a big splash (and almost killed the company) investing heavily in desktop LINUX, the supposedly Windows killer. 

BE Operating System was an entirely new OS developed in 1991.  Unlike the Chrome OS or Corel, it wasn’t a rehash of LINUX with a new set of apps thrown on top of it.  It was an entirely brand new operating system from the kernel upwards.  It had the same ambitious target – replace Windows with a better operating system.  It had a niche following originally as a replacement to the Apple Operating System (since the BE OS initially only ran on Power PC Chips and not Intel) and then as a Windows replacement.   The company could not gain enough market share and eventually was bought out by Palm.

The same reasons why these operating systems didn’t survive will cause major challenges for Google.  I found this table from Microsoft to challenge the proposition of the Network Computer:

	PC	Network Computer
Operating System	Windows	Proprietary / Incompatible
Mobile Support	Excellent	None
Applications	> 100,000	Limited / Incompatible
Development Tools	Choice	Limited to Java
Device Support	Thousands	Proprietary / Incompatible
Device Model	Windows	None / Incompatible
Manufacturers	2,500	Few
Networking	Choice	Requires high speed net
Availability	Now	Limited
Printer Support	Thousands	None
Scalability	Excellent	Poor

With using LINUX, Google can solve some of these issues (scalability for example).  But even OS X for example has less third party support than Windows and far less partners and applications and it is fairly mature.  Google will have none of these advantages.

Challenges with Sharing Excel Workbooks in SharePoint

In Excel 2007 (and 2003), you can share a workbook.  This allows users to simultaneously update the same file:

This feature is used in many enterprises for collaboration, especially in departments such as Finance or Planning where there are lots of shared figures, budgets, plans, etc.

There are some interesting features that allow for some rich collaboration scenarios simply within a single Excel file:

• Each time that you save the shared workbook, you are prompted with the changes that other users have saved since the last time that you saved the shared workbook. If you want to keep the shared workbook open to monitor progress, Excel can update you with the changes automatically, at timed intervals that you specify, with or without saving the workbook yourself.
• When you save changes to a shared workbook, another person who is editing the workbook might have saved changes to the same cells. In this case, the changes conflict, and you are prompted with a conflict resolution dialog box so that you can choose which changes to keep

When moving to SharePoint as a document management platform, this feature is no longer supported:

More than one user cannot simultaneously make changes to a shared workbook that is stored on a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site. If you want to store your workbook on a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site, you should do so only after the collaboration effort through sharing is complete.

Document libraries by design only allow one person to edit a document at the same time.  In addition, they support check-in and out to provide locks on documents during the editing process.  When a user grabs a file for editing from SharePoint, they edit a file on their local machine and then when done it is saved back to the central document repository. 

Excel Services allows for running of Excel files within the SharePoint server, but only in read only fashion.  Excel Services is great for read only dashboards, charts and graphs but isn’t a collaboration service.

For more information on the different options for Excel collaboration, see Microsoft’s article on the subject.