SharePoint 2007 Updates

This is a live blog post in that as long as there are significant updates to SharePoint Server 2007 and/or Windows SharePoint Services, the links will be added here.

This post was last updated: 1st November 2009

Service Packs and Cumulative Updates

The easiest place to go for the latest service pack is the TechNet Resource Center. It also includes any cumulative updates released in between service packs. Note that Service Pack 2 will be mandatory for any servers being upgraded to SharePoint Server 2010 when it is released (expected during the first half of 2010):

• Update Resource Center for SharePoint Technologies (TechNet)
• Service Pack 2 (TechNet)

Infrastructure Update

In July 2008, Microsoft released an infrastructure update for SharePoint Server 2007, introducing new search features included with Search Server 2008 (such as federated search and an improved search administration dashboard). It is included with both Standard and Enterprise versions of SharePoint Server 2007 and is well worth installing. If you are just running Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) you have two options - 1. Install Search Server 2008 Express (no additional licensing cost, it runs as a service on Windows Server just like WSS and is limited to a single server instance) or 2. Install Search Server 2008 - identical to Search Server Express but with scale-out options. Realistically, in this case, you are more likely to jump to full SharePoint Server 2007. Scaling just using Search Server 2008 is best suited for indexing non-SharePoint environments.

• Infrastructure Update (TechNet)
• Notes about the Infrastructure Update (MS blog post)

PerformancePoint Server 2007

In January 2009, Microsoft announced that PerformancePoint Server 2007 would no longer be sold as a separate server product and instead is now included with SharePoint. PerformancePoint provides much richer business intelligence and performance management capabilities (scorecards, strategy maps) than are provided with just SharePoint. Note it is only available with the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint Server 2007. It is not included with Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Server 2007 Standard Edition. To check if you have the Enterprise Edition installed, check your Admin console and see if you have Excel Services or the Business Data Catalog listed. Both features are exclusive to the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint Server 2007.

• Microsoft Business Intelligence Strategy Update and SharePoint (MS blog post)
• PerformancePoint Server resources on TechNet (including latest service pack)

Introducing Microsoft PowerPivot

[Note:] This article has been cross-posted from the Joining Dots blog

So much for publishing soundbites during the recent SharePoint 2009 Conference. What can I say, I got distracted :-) Here's a delayed one.

Microsoft announced a new product at the conference that has been going under the codename Project Gemini - PowerPivot

PowerPivot is being released as an add-on component to Excel 2010 (licensing not available at time of writing). It's purpose: analysing massive sets of data using familiar tools. It brings business intelligence (BI) into Excel. Historically, to do such large scale analysis has required specialist tools.

PowerPivot enables incredibly fast filtering and sorting of spreadsheet data extending to 100 million rows. That's a pretty big dataset for Excel to handle. PowerPivot includes some nifty compression algorithms and the working data set is read only. There are features to enable you to edit related tables that feed into it. With SharePoint 2010 you will be able to display the content and analysis in web parts for browser-only scenarios. And whilst its title suggests it's a giant PivotTable, PowerPivot is not your traditional Excel pivot table. You can have multiple slices based on related tables to cross-analyse the data. Here's a couple of images taken from the conference:

In the image above there is the main pivot table (selected in blue) summarising and filtering total purchases by selected continents. To the left and top left of it you can see two slices that are being used to further filter the data by genre and rating

In the image above you can see one of the new functions that are included with PowerPivot, it is creating a sum by matching values in a related table. It's hard to visualise how different this is to the traditional Excel pivot tables and formulas. One example given during the talk was that PowerPivot could enable historical comparison analysis such as comparing accounting information across financial years.

This is an interesting move for Microsoft as we enter an era where massive amounts of data are being created and shared across the Internet. Finding easy ways to visualise such quantities of data is a hot topic. Microsoft is not the ony one coming up with new tools...

Some reading on how massive amounts of data is challenging conventional wisdom:

• Recent Innovations in method (The Technium, December 2004)
• The Google Way of Science - replacing the hypothesis (The Technium, June 2008)
• The Future is Big Data in the Cloud (GigaOM, October 2009)

Side note: Whilst I can see where Microsoft got the name from, I can't help but keep calling it PivotPoint instead. Blame SharePoint, PowerPoint and PerformancePoint for that :-)