The Portal Is Dead. Long Live The Portal.

Circle time, everyone! Please give a warm welcome and a ripe round of applause to today’s secret reader, a convivial and by and large easy-going man from Redmond, Washington who’s got a shorter attention span than the third-graders encircling him, and who’s about as contemplative as a silken windhound, but who nevertheless loves to tell a good story. And, thar she blows:

“Once upon a time, children, there was an ancient and advanced civilization – perchance an alien one – that came before us, as our ancestors here on earth. That was of course a long, long time ago. Theirs was a race of scientists, inventors, and builders whose discoveries, inventions, and building feats would be unimaginable and all but inconceivable for us today. Their ingenuity was boundless and their ambition endless, and so in their desire to attain more knowledge, fashion greater inventions, and build bigger things, their race had ravaged the earth, depleting its resources in order to fuel their zeal and unrelenting industriousness. Lest you wonder, they were not evil – no, they were not; you might even call them human, for you could say that it was in their nature to discover, to learn, and to strive for ever more. So then the earth lay barren, as the aliens had mined all the ore it had to give, and the time had come for those who came before us to leave this world. An entire civilization had collapsed under the weight of its own advancement, and as their people were boarding the evacuation crafts to set sail for other worlds, their leaders vowed to protect future races from a similar fate. And so they tore down their cities, dismantled their laboratories, and disassembled their machines, and cast away all remnants of their scientific knowledge and technological might deep into the mine shafts, the holes they had drilled into the heart of the earth. The aliens also left behind a small group of sentries, including some of their finest computer scientists, who selflessly remained on this planet so they could guard the knowledge and technology that was kept hidden inside those mines, silently waiting to be unearthed again maybe in a distant future. When the alien ships had departed, the earth was in great pain and started to cry, and so it rained for thousands of years, flooding the plains with raging rivers and covering the abandoned mines under yawning oceans, and at last the earth healed itself, recovering unwearyingly until today. Yet the sentries too would wait patiently – over eons of generations, if necessary – for any future civilization to form, grow, and evolve. And they would carefully watch the progress of these new specimen, and only when they were deemed ready and responsible in their use of it, would they be given access to that knowledge and technology. For that was the stated mission of those who stayed behind, to prevent future people from following their very own path of curiosity, discovery, and the ensuing endless cycle of invention and creation of things that would require more and more resources to consume, and that would lead, yet again, to the destruction of the planet. Yes, they would bestow upon those yet to be spawned by an arbitrary chemical flash of the universe, the wisdom and the tools necessary to advance to civilization. But in an orderly and sensible fashion, without rushing nature or committing rash judgment, like you would never dream of giving a matchbook to a child or letting Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globes ever again. And yes, these sentinels are still amongst us … but you cannot see them, for they are hidden in plain sight, whilst they sit on every (heck, almost every) desktop and live in practically every home … they’ve been protecting you like only a parent would, and they remain your guardians forever more … they call themselves … … … Microsoft.”

Mr. Ballmer … sorry, sir, I believe we just lost the children (more like: Steve, man, you had to fly a whole B-2 bomber squadron over these poor kids’ heads!). Only Reggie has the good form to excuse himself to visit his urologist, but all the others in Ms. Maidstone’s gaggle are now toiling catatonically between Medieval boredom for a complete lack of comprehension and a state of bare and phalanxed fear, because there’s a grown man pounding his white-knuckled fists on a lectern that isn’t there, while yelling something about “Your Potential. Our Passion.” Even the part-absentee Reggie would later conclude that today’s classroom visitor – though hardly prepossessing vis-à-vis his physical attributes – had this maniacal energy about him – curiously, even when talking about mundane things like windows – that would make Shaka Zulu look like yet a well-adjusted individual.

Steve Ballmer really did try hard to regale the children. His story had a number of admirable if not charming qualities and was undoubtedly as multi-layered as a Windows 7 upgrade. How coincidental that the master of blood-, sweat-, and tears-soaked chants and the powerful CEO of Microsoft would escort such themes close to your blogger’s own heart:

• Be as advanced as you must, but without ruining the Earth for our children;
• Alien technology is cool, but alien archeology is not, for it means you’re a member of the “looking it up on Google” entitlement club that eschews knowledge from first principles;
• Science and technology are the wayfarers of our cultural evolution; and finally the motto:
• “Number two will never do” … as a certain portal technology has become the victim of its own success with many implementations no longer easily manageable, and a new version of an industry-leading comprehensive collaboration platform now available to delight both administrators and users alike.

SharePoint – of course! – is what your mother used to refer to as the quintessential “portal,” a collection of web-based collaboration elements, process management components, search modules, and document-management functions. With SharePoint you can easily host web sites that access shared workspaces, information stores, and documents, as well as control host-defined applications, such as blogs and wikis. Users of the system can just as easily manipulate so-called “Web Parts” controls to customize the portal or interact with any of the content pieces, such as item lists and document libraries. But just like our allegorical alien race which succumbed to its own success, SharePoint has been so successful in its adoption that many SharePoint implementations have over time grown massive and unwieldy with too much content and too many users and with generally too many options for users to interact with that content. SharePoint customers getting burdened by the management of an implementation that has become too popular and gotten out-of-control, can now look to Microsoft’s brand-new release to reevaluate and reorganize their environments, making them a lot more usable and far easier to search. Le Portal est mort. Vive le Portal!

Microsoft bills its latest version of SharePoint as the “Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web,” and SharePoint 2010, which went RTM on April 17 and is launching globally this week on May 12, represents a huge improvement over its predecessor SharePoint Server 2007. Some of the new feature highlights include:

• A new user interface, including the new “Office Ribbon,” providing the proper context for any task for both administrators and users;
• A function called “Web Edit,” allowing easy site customization, with SharePoint 2010 now being more like a wiki and with sites being presented as pages rather than lists;
• An integration point called “Silverlight Web Part,” allowing rapid integration of rich Silverlight applications;
• A feature called “Rich Theming,” allowing simplified site skinning;
• Enterprise Metadata Management (also known as the “SharePoint taxonomy”), enabling a centralized taxonomy;
• A new “services model” makes the “Shared Services Provider” of the 2007 release redundant, allowing administrators to decide whether services are run against a central farm or live on a local server; administrators can be delegated for specific applications, and permissions can be set at the application feature level;
• Updated data connectivity service for creating, deleting, and managing external-source data, from say Oracle or SAP;
• Improved search with added flexibility, redundancy, and scalability through multiple indexers, increased crawl frequency, performance, and volume / load-balancing among crawlers;
• Improved security through a new authentication model – based on standard protocols, including SAML, WS-Federation, WS-Trust, and “managed accounts” – supporting a wide variety of identity managers;
• A new “health analyzer” extends the “best practices analyzer” of SharePoint 2007;
• Central administration through a browser-based dashboard and flexible PowerShell-scripting options;
• Workspace caches changes and synchronizes them when users go offline and reconnect to the SharePoint site;
• Upgraded databases are presented with their visual elements from the older platform, including helpful “2010” and “prior” modes, while server administrators can mark databases as read-only during the upgrade, allowing users access while locking databases against changes until the upgrade is complete;
• An easy upgrade path for both farm and server administrators who can now upgrade a number of databases in parallel by running multiple PowerShell sessions (including alternate-access mapping in order to direct traffic between a SharePoint 2010 farm and an existing SharePoint farm, using an HTTP “302” redirect for more “gradual” upgrades).

I invite you to contact me (christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com) should you or your company be thinking about using Microsoft SharePoint, whether it’s to build a new site or to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. Our company Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com/) has helped many of our clients successfully implement 2007 as well as already make the most of 2010’s new metadata features: migrating and tagging content, designing efficient, reusable taxonomy structures, and moving (often ultra-heavy!) content between sites and file servers.

At this point, I’m particularly proud to be able to reference one of our largest and oldest SharePoint clients, our valued customer and long-standing, multi-year partner, Agilent. Agilent Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis (http://www.chem.agilent.com/en-US/Pages/Homepage.aspx) is a leading global provider of instrumentation, supplies, software and services to the life science and chemical analysis markets. With revenue of $2.2 billion, the group accounted for approximately 38% of Agilent’s $5.8 billion of total revenue in 2008, and its 5,000 employees serve more than 25,000 customers in more than 100 countries. Agilent engaged Talent Trust to provide SharePoint developers and publishers in a remote staff augmentation model. These remotely stationed contractors are spread across five strategically chosen offshore locations; they work under Agilent’s direct supervision and form a virtual extension of the client’s Colorado-based SharePoint team. The Talent Trust-provisioned personnel is charged with helping develop and maintain Agilent’s Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis global web presence, which is implemented in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; the group is also charged with all related SharePoint publishing activities to update the commerce and catalog sites. Agilent had a dual objective: to create a dedicated SharePoint maintenance and publishing team with offshore leverage for critical cost savings; and to distribute that team across three main time-zones in three different continents and with the associated differential language capabilities to be able to achieve a hyper-productive 24×7 support organization as well as offer region-specific, localized support to its constituents (customers, suppliers, employees). For this multi-continent distributed team to function as a cohesive unit – and, just as importantly, following Agilent’s best-practice prescriptions for external publishing at all times – a common body of standard training, performance management, and process workflow had to be created and implemented, whereas strict and continuous adherence to globally-consistent taxonomies and common practices are deemed key success factors.