
For its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club made it really well. According to the president, more than 150 people are attending the event, the achievement of 3 months of organization.
The keynote is done by Nicolette Du Toit, SharePoint Product Manager for Switzerland, who has a nice surprise for all the attendees : a pass to get access to all the presentations of the SharePoint Conference 2009. She also announces the setup of a community website around SharePoint : http://www.sharepointcommunity.ch/. It should be live around January 2010. Then, she gives the availability dates for the SharePoint 2010 public beta :
18th of November for everyone
16th of November for the MSDN and TechNet subscribers
The event has been split in 6 different presentation of about 20 minutes. As some of the information were already give during the SPC09 event, only the first three presentations are summarized with the occasion to precise or add other informatio.
Search :
With the acquisition of FAST 18 month ago, Microsoft stays now in the upper right of the Gartner magic quadrant. One of the things FAST adds to SharePoint is the ability to extract the keywords from the content and proposing them to the user in the search refinements bar on the left of the window. In a search result, as an example, PPTX preview will be available without having to download and open the file. On the other side, a user can specify keywords for which he wants to appear in the people search result.
Communities :
This presentation was explaining that people needed more than just wikis, blogs, people search and mysites. They now want to have access to pictures, videos, the person’s hobbies, interests or other job information. This is what offers SharePoint 2010 among a lot of other things.
A feature I missed in the previous post is that now, in a document library, it is possible to select more than one files and to do a multiple check-in / check-out
Composites :
Demo on creating lists with the new SharePoint Designer. By the way, SharePoint Designer 2007 will not be able to connect a SharePoint 2010 server and vice-and-versa. The demo also showed the creation of an InfoPath form with validation rules. The interesting thing is the possibility, with SharePoint workspace, to take these forms offline with the validation rules. Also, during the definition of a workflow, the designer supports the “Intellisense”, proposing activities starting with the characters already typed in the activity name field.