What makes SharePoint projects different? As it turns out, managing SharePoint projects is not like managing any ordinary development or software implementation project. How can you make sure your SharePoint projects succeed? And how can you make sure a successful project delivers added value to your business? Learn about best practices for achieving true stakeholder involvement & commitment and what improvements are introduced in SharePoint 2010 to help you deliver successful SharePoint projects.

The session slides are on SlideShare:

• The ever increasing volume and complexity of content;
• Pricing pressure from open-source vendors or competing "stack" or suite vendors is stimulating demand;
• Often no single person controls the budget for all of an organization’s ECM components and solutions, so point purchases remain common.

Gartner thinks the market is in its final stages of consolidation with the Open Text acquisition of Vignette and Autonomy buying Interwoven in 2009 (both acquisition targets are dropped from the quadrant). That’s probably true, but the interesting thing is, this also seems to create room for new players in the ECM game.

The number of added vendors is noticeable: Autonomy (because of their Interwoven acquisition), Fabasoft, Laserfiche, Newgen, Perceptive, Siav, Systemware and SpringCM.

Every year there’s a lot of criticism about these quadrants (or Forrester’s Waves and alike). Although I agree these lists shouldn’t be seen as objective rankings they offer an interesting insight in a market, in this case the Enterprise Content Management market.

Gartner also recognizes some trends that are worth mentioning. They’re not all new, but nevertheless interesting:

• Integration and federation of content repositories through standards like Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) becomes critical;
• Alternative delivery models, such as SaaS and open-source software are gaining market share;
• The influence of metadata is becoming clearer, whether tied to a formal taxonomy or tagged informally by users;
• User interfaces are improving and are becoming a USP;
• Organization are looking more and more at deploying ECM systems along side portal products such as Microsoft SharePoint, instead of replacing one for another: Hybrid content architectures emerge;
• Vendors are increasingly focusing on adding value by bundling specific functions as vertical or horizontal solutions that are integrated with industry, ERP or CRM applications, instead of bundling generalist functions – such as imaging, library services and document collaboration – leaving these functions to infrastructure vendors.

Kudos to Oracle for offering this years quadrant as a free download. There’s also an interesting read by Bex Huff on Gartner’s evaluation of Oracle’s ECM stack.

I’ll try to blog about all this exciting new stuff later on, but these are the highlights I especially like:

• With Managed Metadata Services SharePoint 2010 supports content types and taxonomies, not only across sites or site collections but also across server farms. The top-down taxonomy and bottoms-up social tagging (or folksonomy) can be combined to help improve search, navigation and people connections. Also taxonomies can multilingual
• In SharePoint 2010 ‘Document Sets’ offer a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. Finally there’s a powerful out of the box solution to work with dossiers within SharePoint.
• Records management is seriously improved and SharePoint 2010 will be a serious alternative for records management. These new records management features include location-based file plans, multi-stage dispositions, in-place records and e-discovery. Especially the in-place records management is great, because now you can leave the content item in its original context (with discussions, all the metadata en workflow history) etc. So now declaring for example SharePoint blogs or wiki-pages as records is very simple as well.
• There will be an out of the box solution for managing file share content from within SharePoint that enables you to store metadata of a document in SharePoint and using workflow, etc.  while the original document stays on the file share. These capabilities also enables easier migration from file share to SharePoint and off course the coexistence of SharePoint and file shares.
• Each document in SharePoint gets a unique ID that isn’t changed by renaming the document or moving it within the farm.
• Document libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. Combined with out of the box metadata driven navigation users can go quickly to the content they’re looking for.This is key for high-end document and records management.
• There’s also a lot of interesting stuff on enterprise search on which I’ll blog later on.
• To be honest I expected a bit more of the improvements in Web Content Management. Although there are some important improvements, I was hoping for a robust solution for multi channeling, but unfortunately that’s missing. Nevertheless, there’s also some interesting new stuff like the new browser ribbon to speed site customization, content authoring and publishing tasks; improved digital asset management features like thumbnails, metadata and ratings for images as well as video streaming from SharePoint; Improved accessibility; Improved content deployment robustness from authoring to production for larger scale sites.

Some others are blogging from the SharePoint Conference as well, like:

• Jeff Teper – Corporate Vice President SharePoint Server at Microsoft – has a great overview of all the new stuff in SharePoint 2010.
• The Microsoft SharePoint Team listed some of the SharePoint 2010 resources that became available.
• John Anderson from Bamboo Solutions has an Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010.
• SharePoint MVP Andrew Connel has three part series on the Web Content Management features of SharePoint 2010:
• Part 1 – Improvements to the Core SharePoint Platform & How the Benefit SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management
• Part 2 – What’s Improved with SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management
• Part 3 – What’s New with SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management

JSR-168, the Java Portlet Specification. This is the standard for the relation between a portlet container (portal software) and the portlets it can display. In theory, JSR-168 compliant portlets can be displayed in any JSR-168 compliant portal.

JSR-286, version 2.0 of the same specification (with several improvements, e.g. the standardization of how portlets communicate with each other).

JSR-170, the Content Repository API for Java. This is the definition of an API to access content repositories. Also known as JCR (the Java Content Repository). To confuse matters more, the standard only describes the API, but “JCR” is commonly used to refer to actual software. Such as Apache Jackrabbit, the JSR-170 reference implementation.

JSR-283, version 2.0 of the same specification (which adds several functions the original specification was lacking, such as improved versioning).

Rather recently we learned that Alfresco has now become the first open source product to demonstrate compliance with the DoD 5015.02 STD spec.

Alfresco was aiming to win the DoD stamp of approval by September. The date apparently slipped a bit, as these things tend to. But back slapping time has arrived and sales force can stop chomping at the bit. Additionally, a more formal announcement is, we are assuming, just around the bend.

Alfresco’s chances for compliance were enhanced by an update in August that delivered a new records management functionality, included reporting tools and query capabilities.

Two interesting sessions this time at the Dutch Information Worker User Group. Ton Stegeman (MVP SharePoint) talking about the SharePoint toolbox and Dennis Vroegop (MVP .Net) about Excel services.
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This paper provides a sample governance plan for an Internet presence deployment in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The plan is designed to help illustrate how to utilize the functionality of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a public Internet site. The fictitious company plans to utilize the functionality to ensure that site content is consistent, updated in a timely manner, branded in line with corporate standards, and tightly controlled.

Probably the biggest advantage is that you don’t have to download documents for editing anymore, making it irrelevant if Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or something else is installed on the clients’ machine. Furthermore Zoho’s “multi-user concurrent editing capabilities” are very interesting.

According to Zoho another advantage is data doesn’t leave your company, but if you look in to the architecture of their solution that’s not entirely true: They offer Zoho Office for SharePoint as a service so the software runs on their servers.

Planning and deploying an enterprise Web site solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a large-scale team project that encompasses multiple planning, deployment, and customization tasks. You can use Microsoft Office Project to help you plan your large scale projects, control the project work, schedules and finances, and keep project teams aligned. To help you envision the steps required to plan, deploy, and customize Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can download a sample Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment project plan that was created by using Office Project 2007.

There also a MS Project 2003 version available. Download the Sample project plan: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment on TechNet. Also thanks to Joel.

The test results in this white paper are intended to demonstrate the difference in the performance characteristics of SharePoint lists containing large numbers of items when different data access types are used to present list contents.

(…)

There is documented guidance for Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 regarding the maximum size of lists and list containers. For typical customer scenarios in which the standard Office SharePoint Server 2007 browser-based user interface is used, the recommendation is that a single list should not have more than 2,000 items per list container. A container in this case means the root of the list, as well as any folders in the list — a folder is a container because other list items are stored within it. A folder can contain items from the list as well as other folders, and each subfolder can contain more of each, and so on. For example, that means that you could have a list with 1,990 items in the root of the site, 10 folders that each contain 2,000 items, and so on. The maximum number of items supported in a list with recursive folders is 5 million items.

(…)

There are some scenarios in which you want to take advantage of the features of Office SharePoint Server 2007, but need to exceed the limit of 2,000 items per container. If you write your own interface for managing and retrieving the data, it’s quite possible that you can go past this limit without an adverse impact on farm performance. You may be able to manage larger lists to some extent by using views within Office SharePoint Server 2007 that are filtered such that there are never more than 2,000 items returned. Filtered views provide better performance than just trying to view one large flat list, but are not as efficient as breaking down the list into different containers if you are using the predefined browser-based Office SharePoint Server 2007 interface. If you develop your own interface, there are several different ways to retrieve list data, each with different performance characteristics. Some data access methods perform very well, but are only useful in a limited number of scenarios. Finally, there are also performance tradeoffs that need to be made with other data maintenance tasks in addition to data retrieval.

Download the whitepaper Working with large lists in Office SharePoint® Server 2007.