SharePoint 2010

http://girishkumarms.blogspot.com/2011/04/sharepoint-foundation-2010-features.html


SharePoint Foundation 2010 Features

Microsoft released new technologies in 2010, and most important in between them is SharePoint Foundation 2010. Previously known by the code name SharePoint 14, SharePoint 2010 marks a significant upgrade to the SharePoint product. Here are some knowledge about what kind of great feature Sharepoint Foundation 2010 has.

New in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010:
Alerts Enhancements
  • Alerts can now be delivered as e-mail or as a Short Messaging Service (SMS) message.
  • The alert system can be programmatically customized with mobile messaging service providers.
Business Connectivity Services
  • You can create, read, update, delete, and query external line-of-business systems and do batch and bulk operations which reduces round trips dramatically.
  • You can create content types for external data and services.
  • There are more connective options including “plug and play” custom connectors and out-of-the-box connections to databases, Web/WCF services, .NET connectivity assemblies, and custom data sources.
Client Object Model
  • There are three new client APIs for interacting with SharePoint 2010 site; .NET managed application (Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or later), Silverlight applications (Microsoft Silverlight 2.0), and ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript).
Events Improvements
  • Event handlers will be available for add and delete events on lists, add events on Web sites, and after events can now be either synchronous or asynchronous.
List Improvements
  • You can create a SharePoint lists that reads and manipulate data from an external data sources such as a SQL Server data table.
  • You can easily create relational lists using lookup fields and have cascading deletion.
  • Lists can now have duplicate or non- duplicate list items.
  • Lists can have custom column validation equations using VBScript.
  • Lists can now have navigation hierarchies and filters based on content types meaning you can have a document library that is broken down into sub-categories based on metadata in your content types.
Microsoft Synch Framework
  • The new Microsoft Sync Framework will allow SharePoint developers to synchronize offline files and data from external applications, services and devices with libraries or lists in SharePoint 2010.
Mobile Device Development Enhancements
  • Mobile Web Part Adapters in SharePoint 2010 allows developers to create adapter controls for Web Parts that you want to make available on mobile pages.
  • Mobile messages can now be sent as Short Messaging Service (SMS) message or Outlook Message Service (OMS) through the SharePoint API.
Query Enhancements
  • A new LINQ to SharePoint provider enables your code to query SharePoint lists from server code by using LINQ syntax.
  • CAML queries will now supports joining multiple lists in a single query and you can specify what list fields to include in the results.
  • Web Services will still be a part of SharePoint 2010, but only for backwards capability support. For best performance and usability, it is recommended that you use either the client object model or the ADO.NET Data Services Framework.
Ribbon Menu
  • SharePoint 2010 will have use the popular ribbon menu system from Office 2007 to replace the old style of the publishing tool bar control and some administrative menus.
  • Central Administration screens will also use a ribbon menu system.
  • You can customize the ribbon with a Feature or through a user custom action.
Sandboxed Solutions
  • Sandboxed Solutions are partially trusted solutions that are limited to using subset of the Microsoft SharePoint namespace and can be monitored by farm administration for CPU execution time, memory consumption, database query time, abnormal terminations, critical exceptions, unhandled exceptions, and data marshalling.
Service Application Framework
  • The Service Application Framework replaces the Shared Services Provider in MOSS 2007
  • The Service Application Framework is an API that manages services and enables them to be load balanced and shared between computers on a server farm.
  • The Service Application Framework has over 20 built in services and can be extended by developers for their applications.
Silverlight Integration and the Fluid Application Model
  • Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 is now automatically installed with SharePoint 2010. Silverlight Web Parts allow Silverlight applications to be easily intergraded into your site pages.
  • Fluid Application Model is a new concept in SharePoint 2010 that allows non-SharePoint applications hosted on another server to be made available to all Web applications in a farm. Web site users with contributor rights can add Web Parts that host non-SharePoint applications to their page.
UI Improvements
  • Content and application pages now contain the same content placeholders and application pages now reference the site master page.
  • The CSS has been divided into multiple files to enable more targeted customization scenarios and to improve page loading performance.
  • More cross-browser support thanks to Silverlight.
  • SharePoint 2010 says it be WCAG 2.0 AA complaint.
  • You can choice between using the old SharePoint 2007 user interface or using new SharePoint 2010 user interface that uses Silverlight and the ribbon menu system.
Windows PowerShell for SharePoint
  • Windows PowerShell for SharePoint is a new command-line tool and a supporting scripting language from Microsoft that complements Cmd.exe in the Windows administration context and that supersedes the Stsadm.exe administration tool.
  • Although both Cmd.exe and Stsadm.exe will be maintained for backward compatibility, all current and future development of scripts and administrative files in SharePoint Foundation should use this new scripting technology.
Workflow Improvements
  • New workflow actions, Pluggable workflow services provide a mechanism for workflows to interact and receive data from external sources, more workflow events (WorkflowStarting, WorkflowStarted, WorkflowCompleted, WorkflowLoading, WorkflowUnloading, and WorkflowPostponed), site based workflows, high privilege workflows, and reusable declarative workflows.
InfoPath Forms Services
  • You can generate a simple InfoPath form that puts data into a custom list by clicking on the “List” properties in the ribbon and then the “Customize Form” menu item.
  • With InforPath 2010 it is easier to build rich forms declaratively with little to no code and more client-side validation.


New in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010:
Enterprise Content Management
  • Site administrators can create rules in the “Content Organizer” section of SharePoint 2010 to redirect files to another folder, library, or record center based on the metadata of a file.
  • Document Sets applies metadata to entire collection of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or other types of document content.
  • Document Sets support templates and versioning.
  • Document ID services adds a unique identifier to all documents throughout the site collection so you can retrieve documents by an ID no matter where it is stored.
  • You can create folder metadata.
  • In-Place Records Management incorporates record management capabilities in any site collection. You no longer have to use a Records Center site template to manage your documents.
  • Enterprise content types can be used in multiple site collections in the same or different farms.
  • Large page libraries allow more pages and folders to be store in one library than in SharePoint 2007. Libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. This mean you don’t have to break down your site into sub sites to maintain performance.
SharePoint Enterprise Search
  • You can define a custom ranking model to use for search queries by creating a ranking model schema.
  • The SharePoint Search Connector Framework enables you to create search connectors to connect and crawl custom content repositories like external web sites, file servers, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Documentum and FileNet.
  • SharePoint Search a new phonetic search algorithm and spell check so you don’t have to worry about spelling words or names correctly.
PerformancePoint Services
  • Performance Point Server will now be part of SharePoint Server 2010 and will allow business users to create dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs). (Side Note: If you have enterprise edition of MOSS 2007 you can run Performance Point Server 2007. Check Microsoft website for more details.)
Excel Services
  • Excel services now includes richer pivoting, slicing and visualizations like heatmaps and sparklines.
  • Use Excel and PowerPivot, also known as “Gemini”, to quickly manipulate millions of rows of data into a single Excel workbook for ad-hoc reports without having to create or edit an OLAP cube.
  • You can use the REST API and the ECMAScript object model to manipulate your Excel workbooks.
Visio Services
  • Like Excel Services, Visio documents can now be rendered within a web browser when they are hosted in SharePoint.
  • Business user can create workflow outlines in Visio and export them to SharePoint designer to add the business logic and additional rules.
User Profiles and Social Data
  • The Microsoft.Office.Server.ActivityFeed namespace provides new functionality for programmatically publishing and gathering the activities of site users.
  • The Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData namespace provides new functionality for programmatically creating and aggregating social tags, ratings, and comments.
  • The Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles provides new functionality that enables you to create role-specific properties for any type of user profile. For example clients vs employees.
Word Automation Services
  • The Word Automation Services provides server-side conversion of documents into other formats including .pdf, .xps, .docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm, .doc, .dot, .rtf, .mht, .mhtml, and .xml.






SharePoint 2010 Interview Questions

 
 
 
 
 
 
1 Vote

http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=https://red1s.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/sharepoint-2010-interview-questions/
Funny as the above image is sometimes an interview can take a turn for the worst if your not prepared, especially with the breadth of SharePoint positions and specialities which exist. The below information has been put together after I came across some interview questions while doing a search on functions within SharePoint. I therefore decided to highlight some of the questions I thought suited some of the roles best.
As with a real interview, topics can change quickly so be on your toes for a change in questions if you’re doing well on  a particular topic/subject.
There are a few SharePoint 2010 questions I’ve categorized from the reference sites which I thought would be helpful to an interviewee in this sort of situation:
IT/Pro Questions:
Question
How are Shared Service Providers now handled ?
Answer
In SharePoint 2010 Shared Service Providers (SSP’s) are replaced by Service Applications. Services are no longer combined into a SSP. They are running independent as a service application. The service application architecture is now also built into Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, in contrast to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) architecture that was only part of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
A key benefit here is that all services are installed by default and there is no SSP setup.
image 


Question:
What is the 14 hive (folder) in SharePoint?
Answer:
image 
Microsoft has replaced the “12 hive” structure that we had in SharePoint 2007 with “14 Hive” structure in 2010.
It has apparently added four new folders to its hive.
The Folders are :
* Policy
* UserCode
* WebClients
* WebServices
See the Details at : 14 hive Directory structure 
In SharePoint 2010 This is a step-by-step tutorial to learn using SharePoint 2010′s Server and client object model.
Server Object Model –
Here we will look at how to use SharePoint API’s, LINQ, REST and SharePoint web service to extract data from SharePoint server.
Lets Start with using the API’s in Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities namespaces.
Firstly, to work with SharePoint 2010 components, your code must first establish the site context or site collection context for requests that are made to the server.
Please Note : In SharePoint, the SPsite object also refered to as Site is actually a “Site Collection” object, not a website
and the SPweb object also referred to as “web” is a single site in the site collection.(It can be a top-level site collection site).
also, object of type SPWebApplication is a big boss object which has reference to the web application that contains the site collection.
To get the reference to site context in your code use the recommended Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext class and its members.
Question
How would you re-deploy the old custom solutions in SharePoint 2010.What Changes are needed to the old Solution files.
Answer
SharePoint 2010 object model contains many changes and enhancements, but the custom code will still compile and, will run as expected. You should however, rewrite and recompile any code that refers to files and resources in “12 hive”.
Question
How many types of Client Object model extensions are available in 2010 and when would you use one or the other.
Answer
To develop rich client side solutions, three set of client-side APIs has been introduced in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client namespace. The three APIs are targeted for three different types of clients.
1. .net Managed applications – These are used when we have to create console applications or window applications, web applications which are not running inside SharePoint Context.
2. For Silverlight applications
3. ECMAScript – It is a client object model extension for using with JavaScript or JScript. This is used for creating applications which are hosted inside SharePoint. For example, web part deployed in SharePoint site can use this JavaScript API for accessing SharePoint from browser using JavaScript.
Question
What are the security improvements in SharePoint 2010 ?
Answer
In SharePoint 2010 a variety of security methods have been introduced.
Claims-Based Authentication – Claims based authentication is based on identity. and trust.
Code Access Security – in which you can specify your own code access
security (CAS) policy for your web parts.
Sandbox Solutions – Sandbox Solutions which when deployed to the server, SharePoint runs in a special process that has limited permissions.
Cross-Site Scripting – Introduced to prevent Cross – Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
Question
What are the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint.
Answer
Visual Studio 2010 includes SharePoint-specific project types and project item types, and includes powerful packaging, deployment, and debugging features that help increase your efficiency as a SharePoint 2010 developer.
image 
Some of the Templates available are :
1.Visual Web Part project template.
2. List definition template.
3. Content Type template.
4. Empty Project template.
5. Event Receiver template.
6. some workflow template.
7. the Site Definition template
and many more….

Question
What are SharePoint Sandboxed solutions ?
Answer
SharePoint 2010 provides a new sandboxed environment that enables you to run user solutions without affecting the rest of the SharePoint farm. This environment means that users can upload their own custom solutions without requiring intervention from administrators, and without putting the rest of the farm at risk. This means that the existing sites\pages or components will not be effected by the newly added solution.
image 
Users can deploy the below four things as sandboxed solutions :
1. WebParts.
2. Event Receivers.
3. List Definitions.
4. Workflows.
Question
What are Requirements for SharePoint 2010.
Answer
SharePoint Server 2010 will support only 64 – bit. It will require 64 bit Windows Server 2008 or 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2. In addition to this, it will require 64 bit version of SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005.

Question
What Changes are made in SharePoint 2010 to enforce Referential Integrity?
Answer
In SharePoint 2010, Referential Integrity is enforced using two options, available with Look-up columns.
While creating a Look-up column, you can either choose a) Restrict Delete or b) Cascade Delete to define a relationship between the Look-up list and the list containing the look-up Column. Read Details at SharePoint 2010 Referential integrity – Using LookUp Column 
Question
What’s a Ribbon in SharePoint 2010?
Answer
image 
The Ribbon Bar, is one of the finest improvements that Microsoft added to Office 2007 . SharePoint 2010 follows the same path. The ribbon basically, is a toolbar that appears across the top of each page in SharePoint.
The top-level elements in the Ribbon are tabs. Each tab organizes a set of groups (like Edit.Browse) and contains a set of controls. The controls inside the groups include buttons, drop-down menus, check boxes, combo boxes, split buttons, and galleries. In short, the users now can see the options like checkOut,Check In, Edit Page,Publish Page, delete page under edit tab, on the top of the Page itself.
Question
What’s New in SPALerts ?
Answer
image 
In SharePoint 2007, alerts were send only through e-mails, but in SP2010 users can also send an alert to mobile devices as SMS Messages. A New property DeliveryChannels is introduced to indicate, whether the alert is delivered as E-mail or as an SMS Message.

Question
What is Managed Metadata?
Answer
Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items.
Admin Questions:
Question
What are some of the tools that can be used when backing up a SharePoint 2010 environment?
Answer
image 
  • SharePoint farm backup and recovery
  • SQL Server
  • System Center Data Protection Manager


Question
Describe the potential components for both a single server, and multiple servers, potentially several tiered farms:
Answer
A single-server SharePoint Server 2010 environment leverages a built-in SQL Server 2008 Express database. The problems with this environment is scalability, not being able to install the with built-in database on a domain controller, the database cannot be larger than 4 GB, and you cannot use User Profile Synchronization in a single server with built-in database installation.
An example of a multiple tier farm would be a three-tier topology, considered one of the more efficient physical and logical layouts to supports scaling out or scaling up and provides better distribution of services across the member servers of the farm. This is considered a good architecture since one can add Web servers to the Web tier, add app servers to the application tier, and add database servers to the database tier.
Question
What is Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint ?
Answer
SharePoint 2010 provides a new set of technologies known as Business Connectivity Services for retrieving, editing, updating, and deleting data from external systems(for e.g. data from ERP or CRM database). BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services.
Question
How is BCS Different from BDC in SharePoint 2007 ?
Answer
Even though the BDC made it relatively easy to create read-only solutions that display data in the Business Data List Web Part, it was not so simple to create a solution that enabled users to make changes and write that data back to the external store.
BCS, on the other hand, provides you with Read-Write capable connectivity from Client and Server to Database, WCF/Web Services and .Net Sources. A Developer can now use SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS 2010 rapid development tools to access external data. Read more at Business Data Catalog(BDC) VS Business Connectivity Services(BCS) 

Question
What would you clean up before upgrading to SharePoint 2010?
Answer
Before you begin upgrading from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, you should make sure that your environment is functioning in a healthy state and that you clean up any content that you do not have to upgrade. (More info can be found in my article on upgrading to SharePoint 2010 from 2007)
Question
What Browsers are not supported with SharePoint 2010?
Answer
Older browsers — such as Internet Explorer 6.x and Internet Explorer for Macintosh are not supported by Microsoft. Read More Browser Support at Browser Support in SharePoint 2010 

Developer Questions:
Question
Can we use our custom master page with the application pages in SharePoint 2010 ?
Answer
With 2010, you can now set whether the pages under _Layouts use the same Master Page as the rest of your site. You can enable or disable this functionality through the web application settings in Central Administration. This however, is not applicable to your custom application pages. If you want your custom application page to inherit the site master page you must derive it from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase class.
Question
What does CMDUI.XML contain?
Answer
The definitions for the out-of-the-box ribbon elements are split across several files in the SharePoint root, with TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML\CMDUI.XML being the main one.
Question
Why would you use LINQ over CAML for data retrieval?
Answer
Unlike CAML, with LINQ to SharePoint provider, you are working with strongly typed list item objects. For example, an item in the Announcements list is an object of type Announcement and an item on a Tasks list is an object of type Task. You can then enumerate the objects and get the properties for your use. Also, you can use LINQ syntax and the LINQ keywords built into C# and VB for LINQ queries.
Question
How do you write to SharePoint ULS logs in 2010 ?
Answer
In SharePoint Foundation, ULS exposes configurable settings in two ways, through the – Object model and Windows PowerShell cmdlets. For writing to SharePoint ULS logs developers can can use Diagnostics Service, which will make the customized categories viewable in the administrative UI for our errors.
or they can use the number of cmdlets available for accessing ULS logs using powershell. Some of the cmdlets are Get-SPDiagnosticConfig ,Get-SPLogEvent etc.
Question
How does the Client object model work ?
Answer
When we use SharePoint client API’s to perform a specific task, the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model bundles up these uses of the API into XML and sends it to the server that runs SharePoint Foundation. The server receives this request, and makes appropriate calls into the object model on the server, collects the responses, forms them into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and sends that JSON back to the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model. The client object model parses the JSON and presents the results to the application as .NET Framework objects (or ECMAScript objects for ECMAScript).
Question
Whats New with SharePoint WebParts?
Answer
image 
1. Visual Webparts – Allows you to Drag and Drop the controls from the Toolbox to WebPart Design surface. You can of course write your custom code in the code file. You can also package and deploy your webparts directly to Sharepoint from VS by pressing Clt+F5. Visual studio 2010 also provides you with three different views for developing webparts. The views are split view, design view and Source view(as we have in designer 2007).
Note : The Visual Webpart project Item basically loads a User Control as a WebPart.
2. ASP.Net WebParts – Where a developer can build up User Interface and logic in a class file. You do not have designer for drag and drop of controls. This webpart inherits from standard ASP.Net webpart. For Deployment we can again use ctrl+f5 to deploy this webpart.
Question
What is LINQ. How is it used in SharePoint ?
Answer
LINQ is a feature of the programming languages C# 3.0 and Visual Basic .NET. LINQ allows you to query in an object-oriented way, supports compile-time check, gives you intellisense support in Visual Studio and defines a unified, SQL like syntax to query any data source. But unlike other languages and query syntaxes which vary from one type of data source to another, LINQ can be used to query, in principle, any data source whatsoever. It is commonly used to query objects collections, XML and SQL server data sources.
The LINQ to SharePoint Provider is defined in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq namespace. It translates LINQ queries into Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries.

In closing the better your understanding of the product the better the questions you are able to create. Using the above questions as well as some from the links should allow you to create a good overall measure of the candidates ability.
I normally use the questions as a gauge to figure out what position would suit the candidate best moving from the initial basic admin/IT Pro questions up to development depending on how they fare.
I think the point is also not to confuse what the responses are with what is required information from the respondent, in other words if the interviewee has a good understanding of the information being queried and not responding as per the answers outlined; then that would be good enough for me.

And here are a few general tips on the general interview process, which I thought were quite interesting as well (non technical) – http://lifehacker.com/hiring/ 

Some of the references for the above questions:
Developer Questions with no answers (for those of you that know your stuff Winking smile ) –http://blog.robgarrett.com/2011/03/09/interview-questions-for-sharepoint-developer-position/ 


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