In a most entertaining keynote last evening, Ted Pattison of Critical Path Training looked at SharePoint as a set of building blocks, and he described the developer-admin relationship in many organizations as a bad marriage.

“The love went out years ago, but Bob [the developer] and Olaf [the administrator] are staying together for the kids [end users],” Pattison said. He said developers need to respect the server farms administrators work so hard to build and protect, and that admins need to learn to trust developers to create features without corrupting the SharePoint installation. With plenty of good humor and great demos that sparked spontaneous applause on several occasions, Pattison really showed the powerful capabilities of SharePoint 2010.

Meanwhile, Bill English addressed a Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area SharePoint user group meeting at SPTechCon the night before, and shot from the hip by abandoning the typical PowerPoint presentation and telling folks what he really thinks. Mindsharp, English’s company, did a survey of SharePoint use and found some interesting facts about the number of Web front ends and site collections in the world. We’ll report more on this in an upcoming issue of SPTechReport, but the findings will open some eyes.

*     *     *

Today is the final day here at SPTechCon. Final registration surpassed the 1,000 mark, and we thank all of our attendees, speakers and sponsors for helping to make the conference a big success. We’ll be going over the evaluation forms in the next few weeks, digesting feedback and working to make the next SPTechCon (Oct. 20-22 in the Boston area) even better.

Was there information you were looking for a SPTechCon that you didn’t find? What sessions would you like to see at the next event? E-mail me at drubinstein@bzmedia.com, and we’ll see if we can work them into the program.

— David

NEWS

ShareSquared, a SharePoint consulting company, demonstrated SharePoint Composer on Day Two of the SPTechCon exhibit hall. The solution gives users the ability to import existing configurations into a visual designer, where architects and business executives can plan and model their SharePoint 2010 deployments. Composer then can build the design, either to SharePoint 2010 or back to MOSS 2007, explained David Kruglov, managing director of ShareSquared.

“You can’t do a best practices installation of 2010 without writing code,” he said. “In the existing [Central Administration], there is now way to get to setting without code.”

Composer, he said, gives access to the configuration settings, so the SharePoint deployment is repeatable and conforms to the design…

Modular application development system provider CorasWorks showcased its plug-and-play applications for SharePoint. “Just add data” is the company’s mantra for provisioning applications for the CorasWorks App Store, which now has about 40 applications available for use. The applications run on the AppEngine runtime for SharePoint, which also supports custom applications.

SHOW DAILY SPECIAL
How Developers Can Optimize SharePoint Integration

By Paul Andrew, Technical Product Manager for Microsoft

At this week’s SPTechCon, developers have had many opportunities to explore the new features and integration aspects of SharePoint 2010. As the event comes to a close, forums on integration will continue throughout the developer community with key topics to consider moving forward.

SharePoint 2010 integration capabilities are among the most promising new feature areas for developers to build on. Capability improvements in the new version include workflow integration, Office 2010 application integration and improvements to the Business Data Catalog – now renamed as Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to better represent the new capabilities.

The advances to the BCS are changing the game, and every software developer needs to know about them to harness the benefits. These new opportunities for developers come from strong customer demand to show line-of-business data from disparate back-end systems within SharePoint sites. While SharePoint excels at allowing users to create and manipulate unstructured data for collaboration, there is also a need to share structured data from existing back-end systems.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provide for this and (once data is available to SharePoint) can be manipulated with the regular SharePoint list user interface. BCS can also be used as lookup data in other SharePoint document libraries and lists, and can be indexed for SharePoint Search. Another exciting aspect of BCS is that it can be synchronized offline with the SharePoint Workspace application and other Office Client Applications, such as Outlook and Word.

New features in BCS include the addition of write-back capability—as BDC was read only—making the base functionality available in all SharePoint products. This provides comprehensive tooling in SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, extending use of External Content Types to Office 2010 applications and integrating with SharePoint 2010’s new Claims Based Authentication. Using BCS requires the creation of an External Content Type, which defines the schema for external data, access method and authentication requirements.

Developers can create an External Content Type in three ways. SharePoint Designer 2010 allows for the creation of External Content Types for SQL Database connections and for Web Services. Visual Studio 2010 allows for the creation of External Content Types in .NET code for any data that is accessible with .NET. Using .NET means External Content Types can encapsulate business rules, perform schema modifications from the back end and use the wide variety of protocols and transports available to .NET developers, such as the WCF Adapter Framework. Best of all, the tools don’t require manual XML configuration.

With great tools, several options to create External Content Types, and many ways to use them, we expect integration to be a valuable part of any website created with SharePoint 2010. When users combine the structured data from back-end systems with unstructured data from SharePoint’s collaboration features, the result is a product capable of solving many business challenges. As developers delve further into integration topics this year, there will be numerous opportunities to exchange knowledge of best practices. It will be exciting to participate in the conversation.