Notes from PDC Session: Extending SharePoint Online
******* REMOVED SOME HARSH WORDS ON THE SESSION *******
I took some notes, and augmented it with some of my own thoughts and information.
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SharePoint Online provides:
Managed Services on
the net
- No server deployment needed, just a few
clicks to bring your instance up and running
- Unified
admin center for online services
- Single sign on
system, no federated active directory yet
Enterprise
class Reliability
- Good uptime
- Anti virus
-...
SharePoint
online is available in two tastes: standard (hosted in the
cloud) and dedicated (on premises)
Standard is
most interesting I think: minimum of 5 seats, max 1TB
storage.
On standard we have no custom code
deployment, so we need to be inventive!
SharePoint
Online is a subset of the standard SharePoint product
(extensive slide on this in the slide deck, no access to
that yet)
SharePoint online is for intranet, not
for anonymous internet publishing.
$15 for the
complete suite: Exchange, SharePoint, SharePoint, Office
Live Meeting. Separate parts are a few dollars a piece.
Base
os SharePoint Online is MOSS, but just a subset of
functionality is available. Also just the usual suspect set
of site templates is available: blank, team, wiki, blog,
meeting.
SharePoint Online can be accessed
through the Office apps, SharePoint designer and throuth the
web services.
SharePoint Designer:
- No code
WF
- Customize content types
- Design custom look
and feel
Silverlight:
- talk to the web
services of SharePoint online.
- Uses authentication of
current user accessing the page hosting the Silverlight
control
- See
http://silverlight.net/forums/p/26453/92363.aspx for some
discussion on getting a SharePoint web service call
working
Data View Web Part:
- Consume data
from a data source
- Consume RSS feeds through http
GET
- Consume http data through HTTP GET/POST
- Consume web services
- ...
- Configure
filter, order, paging etc.
- Select columns, rename
columns, ...
- Result is an XSLT file
This
XSLT code can be modified at will. There are infinite
formatting capabilities with XSLT. Also a set of powerful
XSLT extension functions is available in the ddwrt namespace
(See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa505323.aspx
for a SharePoint 2003 article on this function set, see
reflector for additional functions in the 2007 version;-)).
See
http://www.tonstegeman.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=85
for writing XSLT extension functions when you are able to
deploy code, so not for the online scenario; this was not
possible on SharePoint 2003).
Note that the Data
View Web Part can only be constructed with SharePoint
designer.
InfoPath client: custom forms for
workflows
Web services: Can be used from custom
apps (command line, win forms, ...), but also from
Silverlight to have functionality that is hosted in your
SharePoint Online site itself.
You can also host
custom web pages on your own server or in the cloud on
Windows Azure (the new Microsoft cloud platform), and call
SharePoint Online web services in the code behind of these
pages.
What can't be done:
- No Farm
wide configurations
- No Server side code
- No
custom web parts
- No site definitions
-
No coded workflows
- No features
- No
...
There is still a lot that can be done, but that will be an
adventure to find out exactly....