Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

Continuing on from my posts listing reasons to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 I will now look at Multimedia (Assets) and announcements.

The 6 points I’m looking at regarding upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 are:

• Page based on Wiki
• Tagging / Notes / Rating
• Multimedia (Assets)
• Easier Announcements
• Web Apps
• PowerPoint Publishing

Multimedia (Assets) and Announcements

There is now an asset library in SharePoint giving you a really great place to store images and videos. The main advantage over 2007 is just the way in which images are displayed on the page. No longer do you have to suffer with a list if thumbnails, they now go across the page and happily move around to fit different browser sizes.

If you store videos in the asset library then you can play them from the browser (remember that SharePoint 2010 plays nicely with Firefox too) using the nice Silverlight viewer.

For those of you who have gone through the pain of adding pictures into announcements in SharePoint 2007 will absolutely love this feature. In my opinion this is how announcements should always have worked. Click New, insert, image from computer, browse, OK. The picture is then in and can be resized, text layout changed and announcement written!

You can see in the screen snip that there is an insert Video/Audio button. Unfortunately this is greyed out sorry as far as I’ve seen no ability to add YouTube clips OOTB…yet.

Continuing on from my post listing reasons to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 where I looked at pages based on a Wiki, I will now look at Tags, Notes and Rating.

The 6 points I’m looking at regarding upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 are:

• Page based on Wiki
• Tagging / Notes / Rating
• Multimedia (Assets)
• Easier Announcements
• Web Apps
• PowerPoint Publishing

Tagging / Notes / Rating

It’s much easier to add meta data to your SharePoint pages with the ‘I Like It’ tag. Also you can add notes to pages or individual documents. This will enable staff members to tag documents specifically to class groups or subject areas. All theses tags are then exposed through the search!

To set up ratings go into the document library settings and click ‘Rating Settings’ and click the ‘yes’ radio button. Rating is now available on the document library. This will enable great content to surface above everything else!

Look out for part 3 soon!

Chris.

I’ve talked to quite a few people now about the benefits of SharePoint 2010 over 2007. I will share these benefits with you over a couple of blog posts and hopefully persuade you that 2010 is the way forward and to start planning your migration strategies now!

I will focus on these 6 points:

• Page based on Wiki
• Tagging / Notes / Rating
• Multimedia (Assets)
• Easier Announcements
• Web Apps
• PowerPoint Publishing

Pages based on Wiki:

The page wiki layouts means that you can easily edit text, insert images and change the page layout within the browser (remember that SP2010 works equally well in Firefox and IE)

You can add webparts anywhere on the page and even edit text between them!

Adding images can be done easily by simply browsing to an image on your hard drive or another location. This will be really useful in schools allowing heads of departments to enhance the look of the page very simply. The use of the wiki syntax [[link]] easily allows pages to be linked to other content on the site.

Look out for the next part where I will look at Tagging, Notes and Rating.

   Last week the twitter community and blogosphere came alive with the news of the release dates of SharePoint 2010 (April RTM and June general release) so I thought that I would share with you our migration strategy from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The foundation for all of our new builds will be a HyperV virtualized environment the server specification we have chosen for our hosts is as follows

5 x Dell PowerEdge R710 with 72 GB Ram also 2 x Intel XeonX55702.93Ghz Processors

Storage for this and our other virtual servers will be with on a Nexsan SAN solution with 2.5 TB of SAS drives for our SQL databases and 7TB of SATA drives for general storage.

 For our Guest VHD’s for SharePoint we will give each virtual server 8GB Ram each with 64bit Server 2008 R2 installed we will also split the server roles over the 3 virtual SharePoint servers. Chris McKinley will follow up this post with a more detailed look at running SQL 2008 in a failover cluster in HyperV.

 We have already tried moving our 2007 content database over to SharePoint 2010 in our development setup with very good results but I will talk more about that after Chris has posted details of the virtualized SQL setup.