So today I went along to one of the Microsoft UK Techdays (I missed Mondays presentation on Virtulisation due to illness). Todays subject was Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010, and I have to say that I am now starting to see the case for Sharepoint in the organisation.
The day was a large helping of death by PowerPoint (I’m sorry, but even using PowerPoint 2010 with it’s lovely new slide transitions is still death by PowerPoint which ever way you turn it) and after an extended period of being talked at I felt my concentration wavering a little. Some points did make it through though.
One was that SharePoint 2010 now supports true cross-platform, cross-browser fidelity. It was seamless, the guy opened MS Office 2010 docs inside FireFox, Opera, Chrome and Safari, and they looked *identical*. The inline rich web editor was also the same experience across the board, no so much as a pixel out of place.
Even more impressive was that using the inline rich web editors, you could collaborate in real time on the same document without even having the Office application installed. True thin client web app and no more cumbersome checking-in/checking-out.
The demo showed Microsoft making a real effort to adhere to open standards for file and data formats to make this cross browser experience possible. Proprietary activex controls have all but been abandoned which hopefully mitigates that particular attack surface vector for the future.
Speaking of which, there was an interesting slide showing statistics that attacks against the operating system were on the decline against a rise in attacks being made against applications. To help protect against this new wave of attacks Microsoft now scans all legacy Office files being opened and compares them against a know signatures database, if they don’t match you are warned and the file is opened in a sandboxed safe mode in the background and an alert is shown to make the user aware. Sweet.
But my favourite part of the entire day was the explicit mention that IE6 was no longer supported for SharePoint and it’s associated web apps :oD
The only barrier I can now see to deploying SharePoint is that it’s still a very large product with a not insignificant pre-requisite list, both in terms of hardware and software.
You’re going to need a server up to running the latest version of Windows, along with enough RAM to make it happy. The cost of the license for Windows, the cost of the SharePoint server application. Then more hardware to run the SQL server backend (with another Windows license plus an SQL license of some flavour).
I’m not sure of the total cost to deploy SharePoint today (no pricing details as of yet for the RTM versions) but I’m pretty certain this is out of reach of most smaller companies, especially when you consider that my current workplace does the whole thing on an old Dell 2850 with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu linux, MySQL and MediaWiki server, all for free.
Really looking forward to tomorrow, Chris Jackson of the SWAT team is presenting a section of the ‘Deploying Windows 7′ day. Maybe I’ll find out how to automate that 5% of my current desktop deployment process that still eludes me ? Here’s hoping ;oD
