Molnar and Otey: You’d really want to have PowerShell for an integrated management experience so you’d manage all your different servers using PowerShell. You wouldn’t want something different for SharePoint from your other servers.
Rizzo: Yes. Train your IT folks once on PowerShell, and then they can leverage PowerShell everywhere. With PowerShell, from a management standpoint, we invested in health rules inside of SharePoint as well. We took a little bit of learning from the SQL Server team in terms of self-healing.
SharePoint now will monitor itself, and try to heal itself if there’s a problem. So it will check disk space to make sure it’s not running out of space, and it will check security to make sure that you don’t have super-user accounts across your entire box. We’re trying to get much more friendly to IT and lights-out operations.
Molnar and Otey: SharePoint 2010 has a new best practices analyzer, doesn’t it?
Rizzo: That’s right. And it’s extensible so you can plug in your own rules if you want to.
Molnar and Otey: So what’s the migration story for SharePoint 2010?
Rizzo: We support upgrades from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. Service Pack 2 of SharePoint 2007 shipped an Upgrade Checker, so back in April or May of 2009 customers could start running it against their 2007 environment, understand where the gotchas may be, and start fixing those gotchas.
We won’t support upgrades from 2003 to 2010—you have to go through 2007. From 2007 to 2010 should be a pretty seamless process for the customer.
Molnar and Otey: Aren’t there vendors available for upgrades from earlier versions?
Rizzo: We have over 5,000 partners on SharePoint, so many of them would be happy to consult on that, and we have ISVs as well.
Molnar and Otey: Isn’t SharePoint 2010 64-bit only?
Rizzo: Yes. It’s 64-bit only, Windows Server 2008, Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and above, and it requires SQL Server 64-bit. We’re following Exchange there. Exchange went 64-bit only in 2007.
We just found a lot of customers ran into problems with 32-bit. They weren’t giving enough memory to SharePoint, and they expected to do amazing things in the 3GB memory space that we had, so 64-bit will make it a lot more performant.
Unfortunately, we had to cut support for IE 6 from the browser. IE 6 is 10 years old and it’s not compliant with XHTML, and not strict in terms of the checking it does of HTML. So to meet modern standards, we had to remove IE 6.
Molnar and Otey: Isn’t that painful for some customers?
Rizzo: It’s painful for customers that have lots of desktops running IE 6. But moving to XHTML, we can now be much more accessible in terms of people with disabilities as well as better at supporting browsers like Firefox and Safari.
Molnar and Otey: Firefox was just added in, right?
Rizzo: Yes, Safari and Firefox 3 and above were added, and IE 7 and IE 8: Any that are XHTML-compliant will be supported.
Molnar and Otey: Shifting gears, how would you describe SharePoint’s role in social networking?
Rizzo: That was another big investment area for us. We’ve had MySite since 2003, so we had Facebook-like sort of stuff. In 2007 we added a whole host of new social features. Customers have been slow to adopt it. People on the Internet are more forgiving around Facebook and MySpace and those sorts of things.
But bringing Internet technology to the enterprise—customers have to worry about security, privacy, and so on. So a translation takes place. We’ve seen good adoption of the MySite technologies—folks like Accenture and Electronic Arts run MySite. They personalize sites for all their employees.
In 2007 we invested even more in things like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, activity feeds—so you know what’s happening in your social network, like birthdays or changes in office numbers or phone numbers or information on document tags. You’re being told what’s happening in your social network rather than having to go and query to find out.
We do support activity feeds and also taxonomies—folksonomies, as well as corporate taxonomies. We support both a top-down corporate taxonomy where an IT department says “Here’s the 50,000 tags you can use inside of our company so we can quickly find things,” and a folksonomy where you use Digg or Del.icio.us, for example, to do a social tag. So you can have bottom-up tagging, and then promote those tags to a corporate tag once you find lots of people are using that tag. Things like social bookmarks and organizational browsing are supported within the SharePoint 2010 platform.
Molnar and Otey: What does the future look like for SharePoint? You’ve come so far so rapidly. What does the next decade look like?
Rizzo: You can see where we’ve made our investments, so that’s no surprise. We’ll continue to invest in enhancing across all the workloads of SharePoint. We’re not done in Search or in Enterprise Content Management.
We’ll keep turning the crank on social and portal—that will be a definite. The other big investment for us is moving to the cloud. We do have SharePoint Online. It’s doing well. We only released it a year and a bit ago—the multi-tenant version.
We’ve had the dedicated version of SharePoint Online where customers like GlaxoSmithKline use it. You outsource your IT to Microsoft pretty much. The multi-tenant version targets more, smaller customers. The larger customers tend to go with dedicated. And we’ve been adding tons of customers in the multi-tenant space. And in 2010 we’ll add more functionality into the multi-tenant space.
Molnar and Otey: So will there be a SharePoint Azure?
Rizzo: Yes. It’s called SharePoint Online. What else will come? Lots of ideas.
Now that we’re closing down the 2010 product, we’re thinking about what will go in the next release. It’s all blue sky. There’s lots of thinking around search: The way that search affects the way that people work. One of the things we think about is how does search change the way that you navigate your content, so that navigation is no longer static?
It becomes dynamic based on search queries. We talk about that as query-less search or search-driven navigation.
And how does social play into that? In 2010, SharePoint will pop you a list of what’s popular based on either search queries or page views, and we use our analytics engine to actually discover all of that for you. So right on the page you can say “oh ten people are viewing these ten pieces of content—it might be good content inside of there.”
We implemented social search in 2010. We take your search results, look at your colleague network, ask what they clicked on, and rank that higher than just based on the algorithm that we have. We think people in your social network are similar to you, so we’ll surface content based on that social network. We make sure SharePoint is completely search and socially aware no matter where you are in the product.