SharePoint 2010 will bring significant changes that will likely be both empowering and disruptive for law firm users and technical staff. Unlike SharePoint 2007, which was released when SharePoint adoption levels were still low, the 2010 release finds its predecessor with over 100 million licenses sold and well entrenched in law firms of all sizes. Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 will therefore have a significant impact on both firm users and clients.

Given this state of affairs, it’s crucial to understand the key benefits that might justify the disruption and cost of upgrading to SharePoint 2010. What follows are a list of new enhancements and subsystems that hold the greatest potential for law firms, which deserve consideration when developing your SharePoint 2010 strategy. Combined with an understanding of the unique circumstances at your firm, this information will help you to make the best decision as to whether and when an upgrade makes sense for you.

LARGE DOCUMENT LIBRARY SUPPORT

Microsoft heard the concerns of its customers with regards to scalability of document libraries. Document libraries can now handle millions of documents without difficulty, which makes SharePoint an even more interesting option for general purpose document management. In addition, new capabilities such as records management, tagging, and rating improve the ways documents stored in SharePoint can be managed and found.

RECORDS MANAGEMENT

A growing concern in many firms, as more and more documents have found their way into SharePoint, has been the lack of a robust records management capability. Most law firms found SharePoint 2007 unsuitable to manage records. SharePoint 2010 has reworked and expanded its records management functions to allow for multiple repositories, as well as the ability to designate documents as “in place” records, i.e., without the need to move them from the list in which they reside. Workflows move documents through their various lifecycle stages, including retention, archival, or destruction. Whether or not SharePoint 2010 can replace dedicated records management software for managing all firm records remains to be seen, but the new capabilities for records should greatly reduce concerns regarding the management of content stored in SharePoint.

FLEXIBLE CONTENT STORAGE

With the ability to handle large numbers of documents, there is a need for more flexible storage management. While the default storage option continues to be Microsoft SQL Server, firms now have two additional options based on the External Blob Store and Remote Blob Store models. EBS and RBS both store document content on a file server rather than in a database, and differ primarily in which server on your SharePoint farm does the heavy lifting. With EBS, web front end servers intercept requests to read or write documents directly to a file server. With RBS, read-write tasks are performed by the SQL Server. EBS offloads processing from the SQL Server, but must be installed on all WFEs. RBS adds to SQL Server loads, but does not need to be replicated across WFEs.

IMPROVED SEARCH WITH FAST

The ability to reliably and quickly search across all documents and content related to client matters is a significant driver of law firm efficiency. The right content must be available to attorneys and legal staff, minimizing the need to spend precious time sifting through irrelevant documents. SharePoint 2010 includes the option to integrate the FAST search technology (acquired by Microsoft in 2009). FAST is a enterprise-level search engine that combines scalability to billions of documents, the ability to extract metadata (e.g., client name, industry, or area of law) from within the body of documents, deep-faceted search that enables rapid drill-down to only the needed documents, and thumbnail preview of office documents that allows users to avoid opening documents to determine relevance.

The FAST option will come at an additional licensing cost and increased complexity, so you will want to consider whether the additional scalability and features warrant the expense and effort. Without FAST, the native SharePoint search will still index and search content from SharePoint, Exchange, file servers, the internet, and other line-of-business applications via the Business Connectivity Service, formerly the Business Data Catalog.

USER FRIENDLY WORKFLOWS

Automated workflow was a diamond-in-the-rough in SharePoint 2007. Simple workflows could be created in SharePoint Designer, but there were significant (some would say severe) limitations. Among these was a user interface that made it difficult to visualize any but the most basic workflow logic, and the fact that workflows created through the Designer were tied to a specific list on a specific site. SharePoint Designer 2010 can now create workflows that are portable across sites, allowing non-programmers to author workflows that can be used by others anywhere on your SharePoint farm. In addition, workflows can be visually manipulated in Visio 2010, which makes it much easier to understand the business processes that a workflow is modeling.

IMPROVED PAGE EDITING

Throughout SharePoint 2010 the process by which authorized users edit pages has been significantly simplified; having a similar feel to that of editing a Word document. Users can type text directly into the page, resize images, set colors and fonts, and perform other simple editing tasks in a more intuitive way. This should improve the ability of practice groups and departments to maintain their own content with limited support from IT. However, this ease of use may be a double-edged sword. As more users assume responsibility for authoring their own pages, increased governance around style and content will be required.

IMPROVED WIKIS

SharePoint 2007 wikis were clearly an afterthought. SharePoint 2010 significantly improves on the wiki functionality of its predecessor in several ways. First is support for multiple wiki page templates – for example, you might create different templates for a forms library or a general procedure. Second is the significantly improved page editor, which has the ability to embed web parts directly into wiki pages, enabling quite complex “mash-ups” of unstructured and structured content. As with all lists in SharePoint 2010, users can rate and tag pages, making it easier for others to find the wiki pages of greatest interest to them.

READ-WRITE ACCESS TO EXTERNAL DATABASES

Many readers may have worked with the Business Data Catalog in SharePoint 2007. The BDC provided a means for connecting to external data stored in SQL Server, and displaying that data through the BDC web parts, or indexing it through SharePoint Search. Microsoft has re-branded the BDC as Business Connectivity Services, and expanded its functionality to allow for full read-write operations. This functionality is exposed through what appears to be a SharePoint list, so the user’s experience in editing SQL data is similar to that of editing data in a native SharePoint list. This opens up a host of possibilities to develop applications for which storing data in a SQL table is preferable to storing it in a SharePoint list.

OFFLINE ACCESS VIA SHAREPOINT WORKSPACE

SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove) provides the ability to take SharePoint documents and data offline, edit that content, and resynchronize it back to SharePoint at a later time. This provides intriguing possibilities for travelling attorneys who need access to client or matter specific documents while at locations without easy access to the internet. For example, if an attorney will be appearing in a court without Wi-Fi, or is on an airplane in route to a client’s location, they could use SharePoint Workspace to view and edit copies of the needed documents until a connection becomes available.

Note, however, that offline access may be a feature with diminishing returns. The number of locations without internet access is rapidly diminishing. Also, one needs to consider the number of documents that will require synchronization. For small document libraries an offline copy may be feasible, whereas for libraries holding tens-of-gigabytes of content it may be better to require a direct connection through the SharePoint web interface.

CONCLUSION

The next version of SharePoint contains hundreds, if not thousands, of significant changes to its predecessor. They range from architectural enhancements to promote scalability to user-interface enhancements that bring SharePoint into conformance with Office 2007 and 2010 and everything in between. Given the sheer breadth and depth of these changes, most legal IT departments are likely to take an iterative approach to evaluating and deploying SharePoint 2010 — selecting those features and subsystems that offer the most value first, and then gradually layering on additional components as the benefits become clear.

This article is reprinted with permission from the April 19, 2010 issue of Law.com. ©2009 ALM Properties Inc.

Guest Author: Mark Gerow
Fenwick & West

Mark Gerow has more than 20 years of experience in IT, professional services and software product development and has provided consulting services to hundreds of companies throughout the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California. He currently works for Fenwick & West, where he leads the application development team and is responsible for defining and implementing the firm’s intranet and extranet strategies using SharePoint technologies.

Last week I stumbled upon some pretty neat functionality of the out-of-the-box List View Web Part in SharePoint 2010: the AJAX Options. When you add a Web Part from the List and Libraries category (that basically shows you every List and Document Library you have on the SharePoint site) behind the scenes the Data View Web Part is being used to display the List or Document Library data.

When you edit such a Web Part once it has been added to a page, you’ll notice there is a new AJAX Options section in the Web Part properties. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and is a web development technique to build more interactive, rich web sites. The AJAX Options are disabled by default, but by enabling you can get some pretty cool results:

• Enable Asynchronous Update: enabling this option will make paging, sorting, filtering work without full page refreshes.
• Show Manual Refresh Button: enabling this option will show an icon to allow the user the refresh the data manually, once again without refreshing the rest of the page.
• Enable Asynchronous Automatic Refresh: when enabled, the Web Part will dynamically refresh the date it’s showing, without completely reloading the page. The interval can be specified in the textbox below.
• Automatic Refreshing Interval: specifies the interval used in the previous option.
• Enable Asynchronous Load: when enabled, the Web Part will initially be displayed without any data in it. But once the page is loaded, the Web Part will asynchronously fetch the data afterwards. When the data is being loaded, the Web Part will display an animation. This option will speed up the initial page load.

This article was originally published on Jan’s blog.

Guest Author: Jan Tielens

Jan Tielens is a.NET Architect and Trainer at U2U. He focuses on Information Worker technologies including SharePoint and Office.

Jan is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Office SharePoint Server and he is well known in the SharePoint community as the author of the SmartPart. You can read his weblog at http://weblogs.asp.net/jan and follow him via twitter at http://twitter.com/jantielens.

At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, I had the distinct pleasure to present the Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 session. The early estimates are that over 1000 people attended that session. I personally had a real good time talking about SharePoint Designer since, aside from the facts that it’s my favorite tool to customize SharePoint and that I co-authored the book on SharePoint Designer 2007, so many enhancements have been made to this product that I didn’t have to use the “maybe this feature will be included in the next version” answer even once in the session Q&A! Awesome! .

As they say, best things in life are Free

First, let’s talk about the price of SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD 2010)… well, or the lack of a price tag. Just like SPD 2007, SPD 2010 will also be a free product. Once it’s available (it will be released with SharePoint 2010 itself which is going to be sometime in the first half of 2010), it will be available at the following site: http://www.microsoft.com/spd. The question that might come to mind is “does this mean that Microsoft will not be further enhancing the product or supporting it fully since it has gone down the free route”. The answer I can confidentially say is Absolutely Not! The product is and will be supported as part of your SharePoint deployment. The reason Microsoft has decided to make the product free is because they did not want the price point of the product to be the barrier in trying to customize and extend SharePoint to its full potential (before jumping into code). You can only do so much within the web browser window. To take ultimate advantage of your SharePoint deployment, it is almost (dare I say) a necessity to use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.

What’s in a Name anyway

The last word in the name of this product confuses many people who first hear about it (IMHO). SharePoint Designer to them insinuates that it must be a product for people who need to do branding or styling in SharePoint. While it’s true that SPD is really good at letting you apply style sheets to your sites, modify existing SharePoint themes, alter or create new Master Pages etc, this is only one part of its functionality. In my own case, for example, I use SPD for all the non-branding reasons. I use it to create end to end solutions on top of SharePoint using functionality such as the Data View web part, Workflow designer, manipulating web part zones, creating page layouts, using the built in reports etc. just to name a few. I truly believe and always mention to my customers to very seriously consider using SharePoint Designer in their environment to take full advantage of their SharePoint investment.

The bells and whistles of SharePoint Designer 2010

In my session at SPC, I presented 10 features of SharePoint Designer 2010. I also did plenty of demos related to these features. Whether you attended the conference or not, you can find the video demos for all of them at the SharePoint-Videos.com site here: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/free-sharepoint-sharepoint-designer-and-infopath-2010-videos/. The features that I highlighted are listed below. Keep in mind, that there are more great things about SPD 2010 then are listed below. Also, not all of them are new, but they are all very useful. This is just to give you a taste of the power of SPD.

1. New User Experience with Summary Pages, Ribbon and Quick Launch navigation

Just like the rest of the Microsoft Office suite, SPD also now has a Ribbon on top that changes depending on the object (site, list, workflow etc) you are focused on. Of course there is a learning curve if you are not comfortable with ribbons yet, however, once you do get comfortable with it, it makes you Really productive and efficient! The Summary Pages show you the settings and summary of an object that you are currently viewing. For example, if you are focused on a list, it will show you the name, description, views, forms etc for the list. The Quick Launch navigation on the side gives you a quick way to get to different categories of objects within the site (lists, workflows, site pages etc.). Overall, it’s easier to navigate a SharePoint site using this new user experience.



2. Creating SharePoint Content structure

Once you start out with working in a SharePoint site collection, the types of things you will need to create will consist of subsites, lists for content, and pages to display the information among other things. While creating these objects, you will need to manipulate their name, description, schema and other settings as needed. You can do all of this in the browser or you can do it in SPD. My reason for doing this in SPD is that it’s much faster and efficient than going to the web browser and waiting for each page to load after clicking on a link to, let’s say, change the title and description of the site. The web browser is much slower than using the SPD client application. That’s a fact!



3. Configure Site Security

Until SharePoint 2007, you had to go through the browser to configure the security for your site. It didn’t matter what your credentials were. You could be the SharePoint server admin, but still you had to resort through using the browser. Not anymore! You can configure security directly in SPD now. Creating new SharePoint groups, associating them to the appropriate permission levels and adding users to the groups is all built into the environment now.



4. Create Content Types and attach to Lists directly

Having a good solid content type design in your SharePoint deployment is always a good idea. It is basically how you are telling SharePoint what types of content you will be generating in your environment. If you have not looked into content types, I advise that you read up on it. Using SPD 2010, you can now create your content types hierarchy without going to the browser. Adding site columns (or creating new ones) to content types is also pretty simple to do within SPD.



5. Create Site Assets for your site

There is a new type of library now included in SharePoint 2010 called Site Assets. The objective of this library is to store the files that are used as resources for the site such as style sheets, JavaScript files, xml files and even images which need to be served up on site pages. You can create these resource files in site assets library directly through SPD. Since SPD supports intellisense for JavaScript, style sheets, and also xml, it is a much more conducive environment in which to author these files.



6. Use XSLT List View web parts to show dynamic views of your data

In SharePoint 2007, we had List View web parts (LVWP) to show our list or library content in a page on the site. They worked fine, however, they were not very extensible. Meaning, if you wanted to manipulate their look and feel, you could only get as far as using the pre-built styles and layouts either through the browser or through SPD. On the other hand, we had the XSLT Data View web part (DVWP) which you could configure visually using only SharePoint Designer. That web part lets us manipulate any data points at a very granular level since all data was fetched as XML and manipulated using XSLT which is a very flexible way of transforming and presenting your data. The problem with this approach was that once the web part is deployed, it could not be easily changed or manipulated using the web browser. Enters XSLT List View web part! It gives us the best of both worlds. All lists and libraries are now deployed on pages as XSLT LVWP which can be easily configured using SPD and also extended further as needed using the browser.



7. Connect to Data Sources outside of SharePoint

More often than not, you will need to display data on SharePoint pages that’s coming from outside of SharePoint. SPD provides an easy to use interface to make a connection to a data source that you have access to. It’s a fairly simple wizard driven process to connect to external data sources such as databases, xml files, server side scripts (including RSS feeds), and web services (also included in this release is the support for connecting to REST web services). The best part about this functionality is that you can link the data sources together and then show a unified view of the data. So for example, let’s say you’re in a retail business… your category information could be in a xml file, while your subcategories could be accessible through a vendor’s web service and then your actual products information is in your database. You can first create the connections to your data sources and then connect all of this information together to display a combined view of the data for your users. End users don’t need to know where the actual data is coming from as long as it all just works together ‘automagically’.



8. Create External Content Types using Business Connectivity Services

SharePoint 2007 introduced a new functionality called Business Data Catalog. That functionality has now been renamed Business Connectivity Services. The idea behind this functionality is to expose Line of Business data from your back end services (such as People Soft, SAP, custom databases etc.) to business analysts so they can use them within SharePoint. Each piece of information (for example a table in a database that has your Customers information) can be exposed as an External Content Type (ECT) by an IT professional or a developer using SharePoint Designer. Then a business analyst can use SharePoint through the web browser to make an External List which uses this ECT. The result will be that they have a list now showing information straight from the Customers table in the database (following the example from earlier). When anyone (who has permission of course) manipulates the information in that External List, it will actually be written back to that table in the database.



9. Create Powerful Reusable Workflows

SharePoint Designer 20007 came with a very versatile platform to make really powerful Workflows. These were rule based workflows and utilized the ‘Activities’ already deployed at the server level. Aside from all the good stuff that these workflows provide, there was one big problem… You could not copy these workflows from one list to another or one site to another site. That quickly became a big problem if you had invested hours or days in making the workflow and then found out you couldn’t replicate it anywhere else. With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create reusable workflows! These workflows can then be attached to lists, libraries or even content types. Not only that, but you can even package your workflows as a .wsp (solution file) and extend it further using Visual Studio! In addition to the reusable workflows, you can also create workflows which are specific to a site so there is no need to attach to a list or library at all (called Site Workflows). Oh, did I mention that workflows can now be modeled in Visio 2010 and then exported to SharePoint Designer? There are so many improvements in SPD workflows that it will take a separate blog post to dig into it all.



10. Restrict SharePoint Designer usage as needed

SharePoint Designer 2010 is a powerful application. The usage of this application can be controlled at the Web Application and at the Site Collection level. A Site Collection admin, for example, can decide if she wants her Site admins to be able to utilize SPD at all. Not just that, but various functions within SPD can also be restricted. An example of that is creation and management of Master Pages and Page Layouts. Another facet that can be restricted is customization of pages and detaching them from the site definition.

As you can tell, this is a very exciting new release of SharePoint Designer and it will change the way we manage, customize and configure our SharePoint environments. Each of these 10 things I mentioned above (and more that I did not get a chance to mention), deserve their own separate blog posts. Over time, I will be digging deeper into each of these things to provide you more perspective of how you can best utilize the features to your advantage. For now, I would recommend checking out our free 2010 videos that highlight many of the features listed above and more.

Guest Author: Asif Rehmani – SharePoint Server MVP, MCT
SharePoint eLearning

Asif has over 10 years of training and consulting experience in the IT industry. He has been training and consulting on primarily SharePoint technologies for over 4 years. He is a SharePoint Server MVP and MCT.

Asif is the co-author of the book “Professional SharePoint Designer 2007“ by Wrox publications. He has also been a speaker on SharePoint topics at several conferences over the years including Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, SharePoint Connections, Advisor Live, and Information Workers Conference.

Asif runs a SharePoint eLearning website (http://www.sharepoint-elearning.com) which provides dozens of SharePoint Video Tutorials. He was the co-founder and is currently one of the active leaders of the Chicago SharePoint User Group

One of the usual challenges with SharePoint 2007 was to build a lookup field between two lists but also apply a custom filter to the values being displayed.

Let’s consider a simple scenario: You have two lists on your site: Projects and Project Tasks. You want to link each task in Project Tasks list with a project in Projects list. This was simple even in v2007, you only had to create a lookup column and you were good to go.

But what if you wanted to link tasks with only active Projects (each project has a Yes/No column indicating if it is active), that was a bit more challenging.

Let’s check how you can solve the problem with SharePoint 2010 (Enteprise edition only). Here is what you need to do:

1. On a SharePoint site create one custom list Projects with two columns: Title and Active (Yes/No column). You can add additional columns if you need them.
2. Use Tasks list list template and create a list Project Tasks. Add one additional Lookup column connected to the Projects list (do not select “allow multiple values”)

SharePoint is going to create all the required forms for you. The default form for Project Tasks will look like this. The problem is, it shows inactive projects.

To change this, follow these steps:

1. Open your list. In the List Tasks > List Ribbon click Customize Form button. You must use IE to use the button. You will perform form customization with InfoPath 2010.


2. In the InfoPath form designer right click on Project field and click on the Drop-Down list properties option.


3. On the newly opened dialog click Add button


4. You need to create new connection to receive data from the Projects list. Select Create a new connection to: Receive Data. Click Next >.


5. Select SharePoint library or list as your source. Click Next >.


6. Type in the URL of your SharePoint site. Click Next >.


7. Select the Projects list you created before. Click Next >.


8. From the fields list, select the following fields: Title, and Active. Select to sort by Title. Click Next >.


9. Click theNext button a few times to finalize this wizard. Once completed you will be taken back to the properties dialog.
   
   Select ID field as value field. Click the button Next to Entries field, then Select a Field or Group dialog should appear.


10. On the Select a Field or Group dialog click on the Filter Data… button


11. On the filter dialog, create a filter as shown on the picture below. This will force the drop down to load only active projects.

Close all dialogs and save the changed form. When you go back and try to create a new item in your list, the projects dropdown will only show active projects.

Conclusion

This article describes how you can create a filtered lookup for SharePoint 2010. It is easy to use and no code is required to make it work. A pure end user solution. There are some limitations: it does not resolve the problem of updating old Tasks that have already been assigned to inactive projects. It also only works with Enterprise edition. In future blog posts I will try to create some alternatives for SharePoint foundation.

Guest Author: Toni Frankola
SharePoint Use Cases

Toni started his Web adventure in late 90’s and has been working with various web technologies ever since. These days his main focus is SharePoint technology. He is active in the SharePoint community via his SharePoint blog at http://www.sharepointusecases.com/ and Twitter http://twitter.com/tonifrankola, and also speaks about SharePoint at various SharePoint conferences. Toni runs his own company Acceleratio Ltd., that specializes in SharePoint consulting and developing software products, and leads the Croatian SharePoint User Group.