Microsoft have announced the upcoming planned release of SharePoint 2010′s first service pack. Due to arrive in late June 2011.

Full details in their blog. Short version here for my memory as much anything else

• Introducing the Site Recycle Bin – self-service recovery of site collections and sites!
• Shallow Copy – improved method for managing Remote BLOB Storage – can now move site collections to new content databases without moving the underlying files (used to be uploaded and then downloaded again, waste of resources). Now the references stay intact by simply updating the pointers instead.
• The return of StorMan.aspx – reporting on site quotas (top docs, library size etc.) for site owners to manage their stuff.
• Some work on browser support for IE9 (phew, should be more stable) and Google Chrome
• Plus all the usual bug fixes and will include all Cumulative Update packs through to April 2011.

Microsoft has announced a new indexing connector for business intelligence (BI), specifically BI reports created using Excel and/or SQL Reporting Services, including the new tool for analysing massive amounts of data – PowerPivot. The connector creates a dedicated Report tab to query just reports, includes specific refiners filtering search reports, and thumbnails and previews to view reports within the search results page.

The pre-requisite for using the indexing connector (according to the download page for the backend components)  is that you must be running FAST for SharePoint 2010.

If you are only planning on using SharePoint 2010, i.e. its built-in indexing and search capabilities, you can still index and search for Excel-based reports. You could also create a dedicated tab for them in the Search Center, but would require a manual process to tag reports in order to make them discoverable as a separate scope of results versus embedded along with all other documents that match a given search query. You won’t get the thumbnails or built-in preview, but for Excel you can still ‘view in browser’ thanks to Office Web Applications. The feature you cannot create outside of FAST are the custom refiners. FAST also does some more advanced funky indexing stuff around querying the data sources within the reports.

If you want to give the BI connector a go and are running FAST with SharePoint 2010, here’s the links to download:

• Microsoft BI Indexing Connector for FAST – Backend components
• Microsoft BI Indexing Connector for FAST – Frontend components

Microsoft has released the Productivity Hub – a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection available for download that includes training materials for end-users. Ready to be installed on any internal SharePoint Server 2007 deployment, the Productivity Hub includes:

• SharePoint site collection pre-loaded with content – documents videos etc. – for end user productivity training
• A blog offering tips and tricks that can be used ‘as is’ or customised by training staff
• ‘Train the trainer – IT/Management section for deploying the site collection and developing a coaching programme

Interesting concept – I’ll be adding it to my SharePoint 2007 demo for evaluation and will report back here.

Hat tip to Mark Harrison for posting.

At last, Microsoft have confirmed the launch date for the next versions of Office and SharePoint: 12 May 2010 at 11:00am EST (4:00pm GMT). Click image below to visit the Microsoft website.

Welcome to the new Office hub

Today, Microsoft finally unveiled Windows Mobile 7. To find out all about it, take your pick of the headlines on Techmeme.

Why am I blogging about it?  Just one line matters (well, a few others are also quite interesting but this is the one SharePoint customers have been waiting for):

“You can access any document from your Sharepoint server with editing and creation functionalities on your phone.”

- Source: Know Your Mobile

About flamin’ time

References:

• Techmeme News Feed: Windows Mobile 7 details announced
• Know Your Mobile live blogging the press conference
• In depth coverage from Gizmodo
• Microsoft press release

Please Note: This article was originally posted on the parent site: http://www.joiningdots.net

The United States Olympic Committee have launched a new Press Portal ready for the Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver shortly. The portal is a public web site running on SharePoint Server 2010 Beta with Silverlight serving up embedded media:

I would criticise some elements of the user interface design. Embedding external links in the top navigation bar is not a great idea (first 5 links are for within the web site, from TEAMUSA.ORG onwards are links to external web sites – different font and background colour but not obvious). The Latest News would be easier on the eye to scan if there were a thumbnail for each (instead of author which is not necessary on the home page) and a bit more space between each news item. And there are three different search boxes on the page. Would be great to see an update post-Olympics to identify which one was used the most… But I’m being picky. It’s a brave move to publish such a visible web site on beta software and the site demonstrates how much easier it is to make SharePoint 2010 not look like SharePoint. Congratulations to all involved.

For more information: Visit the USOC web site | Microsoft press release