Top 5 questions on SharePoint 2010 answered - via imason inc.

1. Q&A
Top 5 SharePoint 2010 Questions
PREPARED BY IMASON INC.
APRIL 2010
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2. Answering the Top 5 SharePoint 2010 Questions
The launch of SharePoint 2010 is upon us. Partners, users and employees alike are excited about
the changes, but there are many questions surrounding the launch as well. What is the release
date? Are there licensing fees? What will deployment costs look like and when is the best time to
start preparing for set up. What are the so called ‘game changers’ in the upcoming release? We
have taken the top 5 questions and provided our answers to them below:
1. When will SharePoint 2010 be released?
Microsoft has announced that it will be launched on May 12 of this year. It will likely be released
to manufacture in April, with consumer availability on retail shelves in June.
2. What will the license costs for SharePoint 2010 be for my company?
The licensing costs haven’t been released either, but we’re expecting a model similar to the
existing one, where SharePoint 2010 Foundation Server (formerly Windows SharePoint Services)
will be free.
For SharePoint 2010, we expect the same Standard & Enterprise versions, with both a server
license and a client access license (CAL) required. For external scenarios, a per-server based
licensing model will continue to apply.
3. When should we deploy a solution on SharePoint 2010? Should I wait for the
first service pack? What else should we be thinking about?
Remember the launch of SharePoint 2007? The pre-service pack version had significant issues,
particularly in Internet scenarios. So if your usage falls into the set of features supported in
SharePoint 2007, we feel a pre-SP1 deployment is acceptable.
However, if you are looking to leverage new functionality in the product, like the ability to
federate farms or manage complex taxonomies, it is likely better to pilot these features in
SharePoint 2010 and wait for SP1 before fully deploying them to the enterprise.
4. What effort/cost will be involved in migrating from SharePoint 2003 or
SharePoint 2007?
Microsoft has significantly improved the upgrade experience. The ’all-or-nothing’ requirement in
SharePoint 2007, where upgrades involving vast amounts of data had to occur basically over a
weekend, have been eliminated.
Instead, SharePoint 2010 allows users to control the upgrade timing, and it gives them the
opportunity to ‘preview’ their site post-upgrade to confirm everything works as expected. This
allows you to stretch the upgrade cycle out over a longer period of time, making it more
feasible.
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3. You can expect to push more of your upgrade costs and effort to employees and you should plan
for a team that can deal with exceptions as they occur. We expect the effort to support an
upgrade to still be sizable, ranging from 50k to 250k, depending on the size of the installation.
In situations where development hours have been put into SharePoint 2007, expect a migration
effort. On the up side, the API difference between 2007 & 2010 is minimal. On the down side,
the shared service provider and timer services are depreciated.
At a minimum, the code will need to be recompiled on SharePoint 2010, adjusted as required,
retested on the new platform, and then all data in SharePoint 2007 will need to be upgraded.
And finally please note there is not a migration path from 2003 directly. You must upgrade first
to 2007.
5. What are the “game changers” in SharePoint 2010?
In essence what they’ve done is made the deploy easier, improved the search experience is, and
brought real social networking capability to the enterprise.
SharePoint 2010 smoothes out a number of the rough edges that made it challenging to roll out
SharePoint 2007 across the enterprise. Now, multiple languages are fully supported, so you
don’t have to choose one language to deploy a site in. As, well, it is possible to define centrally-
managed hierarchical metadata fields, content-type ownership can be distributed. and farms can
be better partitioned and managed. Essentially, SharePoint 2010 takes all of the features on the
fringe of SharePoint and fully incorporates them for enterprise roll out.
The search experience in the standard SharePoint 2010 product is significantly better. Most
significantly, facets are supported, making a more interactive search experience possible. And
adding the FAST product brings a whole new level of sophistication, making it possible to manage
content as it is inserted into the index. Our initial feeling is that most customers won’t fully realize
the added value FAST brings until they dive into the powerful content processing pipeline
capability.
SharePoint 2010 also brings real social networking components to the Enterprise. My Site has
support for blogs, videos, wikis, tags & tag clouds, commenting, notes (pseudo ‘wall’ functionality),
expert search, expanded profile information, micro-blogging, org chart viewing, and activity
tracking.
Just a note, in deploying the social media components, consider turning off any document support
– save that for the team sites implementation you might follow with. Our first experience with this
functionality is positive, although we are finding examples where the features aren’t as intuitive
and easy to use as we had hoped. We anticipate that the final build will smooth out some of the
bumps.
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4. To Sum Things Up
Talk To
What hasn’t changed in SharePoint 2010 is the broad spectrum of
choice still available to end users in the platform. That power is what For questions regarding
makes SharePoint so compelling, and it is also what makes it so SharePoint 2010, or to find out
difficult to responsibly deploy. Enterprises still need to think carefully how imason can help you solve
about the use cases they are enabling, and the parameters your business problems, talk to:
employees should be working in to keep the platform properly Jeff Dunmall
managed. Governance is no less important, and while the product Co-founder and Co-CEO
includes more fine-grained control over functionality, you still need a jeff.dunmall@imason.com
well defined governance plan implemented before you roll out the 416.848.1313
feature set to take advantage of it. www.imason.com
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