Wednesday, September 17, 2008 8:00:30 AM UTC 

I've been fascinated with learning as much as I can about SharePoint 14, also known as "the next version of SharePoint." You can see the list of everything I can find publicly here: http://www.pseale.com/blog/SharePoint14EverythingWeKnow.aspx (nothing much has changed since I wrote that post).

One of the advantages of picking up these little tidbits (as well as reading every SharePoint blog known to mankind) is that you can make better guesses.

So, what follows are my educated guesses as to what technologies we'll be adding to the SharePoint arena, with the idea that you can brush up on some of them in preparation. Or just get depressed. I'll help speed the process, either way.

Technologies we'll see in v14

PowerShell

I've seen a hint dropped (by a MS employee) that PowerShell will be part of the next SharePoint framework. I'm guessing admin-style cmdlets, maybe better wrappers than using stsadm. I've become accustomed to using stsadm, but could definitely use some PowerShell shortcuts, especially if they could balloon the number of things PowerShell exposes. There's a lot of potential for using PowerShell as an admin interface, way more than even Exchange 2007 is realizing. And all this on top of everything PowerShell gives you today.

Anyway, learn PowerShell! It's going to be the easiest thing to learn, by far, and as I tell everyone, PowerShell is one of the few technologies that has saved me time, even including the time spent to learn it.

Windows Communication Foundation - WCF

It's inevitable that SharePoint will expose WCF services, and even if SharePoint doesn't, then we'll still eventually be writing our services in WCF (as opposed to ASMX web methods). So, learn the ABC's of WCF. Sahil Malik covers WCF for SharePoint 2007 on his blog, so maybe that's a good place for you to start.

We can hope for WCF services that replace the SharePoint built-in web services of today, though I honestly don't know how they'd improve. Maybe they'd be able to generate list-specific services? I.e. instead of a big "GetListItems" that takes the equivalent of a SQL SELECT query, they'll have something more context-specific? We can hope.

Silverlight 2.0

I'm not sure what form this will take; at minimum we'll have Silverlight Web Part templates. We can also maybe get some "all-Silverlight" site templates, where you visit the site and you don't see a single bit of HTML. As far as I'm concerned, Silverlight looks like a more difficult way to do the same thing we're already doing, but hey, that's me, I'm cranky. I'm going to skip this whole Silverlight thing until someone proves that it's easier to work with Silverlight than the equivalent solution using HTML/CSS/JavaScript; I'll re-evaluate periodically. I'm way too overwhelmed with learning to take Silverlight seriously, so don't expect me to jump on this bandwagon anytime soon.

It's also possible InfoPath will use Silverlight; think about the possibilities (but as always, don't get carried away :) ).

Also, if you're learning Silverlight, then you'll be learning WCF, gotta talk to the server from your Silverlight client somehow.

Claims-based authentication

This is a big shift and, while it may not happen for SharePoint 14, it is probably worth learning about anyway. Here's the NetworkWorld article from 2007 discussing the possibility.

.NET 3.5, IIS 7, Windows Server 2008

I'm including all these for completeness' sake; duh.

Stuff we haven't heard about yet

This section is also included for completeness. While I don't think v14 will be as big of a shift as 2003->2007 was, what do I know? Maybe the entire Dynamics platform will mash itself inside SharePoint; you can only hope (dread) the possibilities. I'm just saying here that no, I don't know what else we're going to get. I can't imagine what Access Web Access will look like. I don't know how Groove is going to work in the new version (are we going to get offline support out-of-the-box? I don't know). I don't know what the SQL-table-backed-lists will do and how they'll work. I don't know if they'll revamp the BDC. There's lots I don't know.

New slices in the SharePoint pie

Master Data Management (MDM)

This will be big. Read up on MDM. You're not going to be an MDM expert, but at least you'll know that it's not as easy as running UNION queries on disparate data sources. Hopefully that doesn't go into the marketing packet.

FAST search (Enterprise Search revamp)

This will change SharePoint's search engine, maybe not in time for SharePoint 14, but maybe so. Microsoft has proven they are able to do out-of-band improvements on their Search platform (MS Search Server), so even if this doesn't happen in time for RTM, you won't have to wait until v15.

Here's a discussion of the FAST Search acquisition on CMSWatch; you can read elsewhere (MS Enterprise Search team blog) about the acquisition, and of course you can check out FAST's product itself, as it exists in its non-integrated form.

Do you have time to learn all this?

If there's an argument to be made for specialization inside of SharePoint, combining this with the existing SharePoint 2007 architect skillset should do it. Don't even try to stay on top of all this; you can't.