SharePoint 2010 – Technical diagrams December 14, 2009

Up on TechNet Microsoft have released a lot of diagrams based on the Beta 2 version of SharePoint 2010.

Many of these resources are visual representations of recommended solutions. They include poster-sized documents available in formats including Microsoft Office Visio 2007 files (.vsd), PDF files, and XPS files.

If you want a poster size diagram from areas like: Services, Topologies, Hosting Environments, Search Technologies, Business Connectivity Services Model, Content Deployment, Upgrade Planning, and business intelligence in SharePoint Server 2010 then get them all from here.

External Lists Limitations in SP2010 December 13, 2009

Currently SharePoint 2010 is in Beta 2 phase and I am investigation the new possibilities given by the new External List feature.

During the investigation found few limitation that I will document them here:

• RSS feeds are not enabled
• InfoPath Forms can be generated but if try to customize them you get in a lot of limitations including not supporting other data connections.
  
• Creating Access View not working
• Data Sheet View is disabled
• Export To Excel is disabled
• Adding extra columns not from the external content Type are not allowed
• Ratings and Workflow are not allowed.
• Trying to change “Information management policy settings” gives error.

SharePoint is currently only in the beta phase but It seems again that external list have a lot of limitations and I don’t know how much of them will be removed by RTM.

Even if Microsoft was trying to make the External Lists to be as transparent as possible for the End User we’ll need to be careful when recommending and use this list because of the existing limitations.

I have hoped that when Microsoft have designed this External List to just decoupled the data storage and data access layer from the rest of the SPList type.