Gallery

Font fundamentals

Posted on 16 Jun 2009 at 00:00

Simon Jones clears up any confusion about font size, leading and kerning, plus discusses what we can expect when office 2010 is finally released.

SharePoint Server 2010 drops the "Office" from its previous name of "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server", apparently because "Office" is too closely identified with the client applications. It will be a 64-bit only product, requiring 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and either 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005. It will use Silverlight and have a Ribbon user interface. Groove has been renamed SharePoint Workspace and will be included in Office 2010 Professional Plus and above to give more options for data synchronisation between client workstations and the SharePoint server. SharePoint 2010 will work better with non-Microsoft browsers such as Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x even on non-Windows clients, but will only work with Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Support for IE 6 and below is being dropped completely. We also know that PerformancePoint Server, Microsoft's scorecard, dashboard and analysis product will be discontinued, but its technology will live on in "PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint", and will become part of the Enterprise version of SharePoint Server.

SharePoint 2010 is closely allied to SQL Server project "Kilimanjaro" , now called SQL Server 2008 R2 and which should ship in the same timeframe (H1 2010). Microsoft's project "Bulldog" - acquired when it bought Stratature in 2007 - will be integrated into SQL Server 2008 R2 as "Master Data Services". This aims to integrate a company's many different data stores to give an overview so that ERP, CRM, support data and all the associated metadata can all be viewed and searched from the one place. We expect this to surface through SharePoint 2010 to make searching and reporting easier. At the TechEd 2009 North America conference in mid-May, Microsoft announced it would deliver the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of SQL Server 2008 R2 in the second half of 2009.

Other improvements slated for SharePoint are rich data types and better scaling. You'll also be able to map your own SQL Server tables into SharePoint lists. Scalability is one of the current bugbears with SharePoint, as its performance degrades noticeably once you have more than a couple of thousand items in a list. Visual Studio 2010 will have a visual designer for SharePoint Web Parts to make it easier to design, debug and deploy the widgets that make up SharePoint pages. Microsoft isn't saying which new features will be in the free Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and which only in the paid-for Microsoft SharePoint Server (not to be called MSS, because that's already used for Microsoft Search Server), but says that it will talk more about the free WSS "at a later date".