Kraft Foods has highly customized SharePoint 2007 to provide the web sites needed by their brand teams.  They worked with RazorFish (XHTML and CSS expertise) and Blackwell Consulting Services (.NET and SharePoint programming) to design a custom yet flexible solution.

By reducing the requirement for marketing agencies to maintain the brand sites, Kraft will save $2MM per year. 

The brand sites contain:

• Community interactions (discussion, rating, etc.)
• Videos
• Images
• Product Info
• Recipes
• Ads and promotions
• Newletters

IT Information - Global IS organization manage 270 global websites.  5 websites have moved to new SharePoint web sites.  The remainder will be done over the next 2 years.

Brand Managers work with a variety of marketing agencies.

Products – CS 2007, SP 2007, SQL 2005, .NET 2.0, Windows Server 2003

Developed "Global Service Components" used by the platform.

Built a "flexible template model" that allows the user's to change the page layout on the fly.

Standard Content Items – specific content with set styles that can be selected by the business user.

Customize the deployment tools to allow "Go-Live" and Rollback

Allows for syndicated content to 3^rd party websites

Brands each wanted unique look and feel.

Ratings and reviews, polls, surveys, subscriptions – standard web parts built by Razorfish

They wanted full creative and layout control over the web parts.

Extensions to MOSS 2007

• Non Visual Master Pages – Define areas for each part of the master page
• Flexible page layouts (now in SP 2010)
• Kraft Page Content Types – MetaData, javascript files
• Standard and Shared Content Web Parts. Needed to included content web parts in multiple pages. Reusable web parts.
• Used CSS friendly HTML (no tables). SP 2010 is doing this also.
• Navigation was a web part that could be placed anywhere on the page. Same web part looking at entire Site Collection structure but with different CSS applied depending on what they want to show and how.

How was it done?

• Separated Content & Presentation
• Web part allows XSLT to be selected and produces XML from the content. Renders compliant XHTML.
• (Get presentation for details – post with blog article)
• Master Page defines areas. Flexible Template allows the areas to be arranged and organized.
• Standard Content Editor web part – customized editing screen. 
• Shared Content is put on to a separate page. This page is then included in other pages as needed.

 Promotion and Versioning

• Blackwell developed a custom Deployment tool that allowed the users to select the pages to promote. Promotions can be rolled back if needed.
• Versioning was done for web parts as well as documents and pages.

Have you used Google Apps and seen where multiple people can work on a document simultaneously? Office 2010 will have that same functionality and it will leverage SharePoint as the common document store.

The goal for multi-user editing is to allow you to act independently of others while editing the same document at the same time using a rich text editor. To be effective, multi-user editing must handle file level conflicts, within document conflicts, merging of changes, and managing multiple copies of the same document.

Currently, OneNote 2007 supports Shared notebooks which provide a level of multi-user editing. Office 2010 enhances and extends that functionality across all the Office products. Below, I have detailed each of the ways multi-user editing is allowed in each product. The big take-away for me is that you get similar features to Excel Services in SharePoint 2007 if you have Office 2010 and SharePoint Foundation Server.

OneNote 2010

• Changes made to content on a page by multiple users are updated in real time.
• Notebooks can be stored in SharePoint just as in 2007.
• Page versioning has been implemented.
• The name of the user making the change is displayed next to the change.
• The OneNote 2010 Web App is used to edit OneNote notebooks w/o needing the OneNote application.

Word 2010

• Status bubble tells you that someone else is also working on the document.
• People icon lets you see who is working on the document along with their presence information.
• Paragraphs are locked as they are being edited.
• Navigation outline displays icons on the section being edited by someone else.
• Someone w/o Word would view the document through the Word Web App. Document can be edited via the Web app also.
• SharePoint versioning is supported and those versions can be viewed from within Word.

PowerPoint 2010

• Same type of notifications as in Word.
• Locks are applied at the object level – clip art, text, shapes, etc. Two people can be working on the same page at the same time.
• Users are notified of conflicting changes.
• Broadcast Slideshow – Broadcast slideshow via SharePoint. This creates a URL that can be sent to users who want to view the presentation. This loads through the PowerPoint 2010 web app. REALLY COOL NOTE: SharePoint 2010 (Server and Foundation) now assigns a unique document ID. This means that a document URL will ALWAYS be the same no matter where it is moved to in SharePoint.

Excel 2010

• Uses roles – Author and Contributors. Contributors can use Excel Web App to view and contribute.
• Author posts spreadsheet to SharePoint using the Excel Web App.
• Status bar in lower right indicates how many people are editing the spreadsheet.
• Locks are applies at the sheet level (need to follow-up on this to be sure this is correct).

Technology Used

The files are cached locally and synced via a file provider to SharePoint. The MS-FSSHTTP file provider sends only the changes to the users as part of each sync. MS no longer uses WebDAV for this type of communication.

A related technology is inside Windows Server 2008 R2. If a user opens a document across the WAN and his/her neighbor (I assume same VLAN) opens the same document later, the server will get the document from the original user and save the trip across the WAN.

I'm trying to get this Blog done early today so I can go hear Huey Lewis and the News!  Microsoft is having an 80's party and Huey Lewis is the main performer.  Should be fun!  I composed this on the Netbook.  The Netbook is slower and took a while to get setup.  So far, I'm not tremendously impressed.

This presentation was given by Rob Lefferts, Microsoft SharePoint Group Program Manager

SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 is the successor to WSS 3.0. It is still the infrastructure and framework that SharePoint Server is built on top of.  Per Microsoft, Foundation Server is intended for team sites, basic content management, developers, and "Starter Farms."  Best of all, it is still a download at no additonal cost!!! Yea!

Foundation Server includes 

• Blogs and Wiki,
• External Lists,
• Business Connectivity Services
• API enhancements,
• A Ribbon-based UI,
• SharePoint Mobile
• SharePoint Workspace
• List enhancements
• External or remote storage (instead of DB)
• Advanced backup, recovery, and disaster recovery.

 What's New in Foundation Server 

• Health Analyzer
• Granular database backup and restore
• Ability to restore from a content database that is not attached.
• More reports on usage.
• Open Usage Analysis Schema
• Developer Dashboard
• Visual Upgrade - See how the new interface will look on your site without committing.
• Site Workflows
• Support for FireFox, Safari, Google Chrome browsers as an editing tool in SharePoint.
• Offline experience via SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove)
• Better Mobile-based interaction
• Word-like editor replaces WSS / MOSS editor.
• Better looking Blogs.
• Enhanced lookup columns - read in additional columns from the lookup list.
• Silverlight Web Part - any Silverlight application can be included in the web part
• Farm upgrade – You can attach a WSS V3 database to a new Foundation farm and it will be upgraded for you.
• Application Services - this used to be the Shared Service Provider in MOSS.

What you don't get

• Profiles
• Social networks
• Taxonomy / Managed Metadata (may still get Tagging, not sure)
• Enhanced Search. 

The first day has been very good – good sessions, good information, and it ended on a high note. I won a Samsung Netbook at the end of the day from a software vendor. It is really cool and really small. I'll try it out on Day 2 of the conference and let you know how it works. I've also realized that if you have extra money to spend or lose, there's a lot to do in Vegas. If you don't, then you just go to conference sessions all day and stay at the hotel. That's what I'm doing. (Except for Tuesday night. Microsoft is having a party.)

SharePoint 2010 Highlights

Beta will be released in November 2009 with expected final release in Q2 of 2010.

New products include SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation Server 2010, SharePoint Server for Internet Sites; Fast Search Server for Business Internet, and SharePoint WorkSpace 2010.

The Office 2007 ribbon bar is used to edit pages, add web parts, and modify page properties. Other interface improvements have led to a cleaner and better looking user interface.

WSS is still the foundation of SharePoint Server 2010 and is still available as a free download. The new name will be SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.

Groove has now become SharePoint Workspace 2010 and will be included with SharePoint Foundation Server 2010. You can set up either SharePoint Workspaces or Groove Workspaces to work with offline and share with others.

All SharePoint pages now work like Wiki pages.

A Word-like, rich text editor is included now in all editing situations.

Photos can be browsed from the local PC and uploaded all in 1 step!! Yea!

All content can be rated and tagged and commented on. SharePoint Server 2007 has advanced taxonomy and folksonomy.

Lists and Document Libraries can now hold 1 million+ items. This is a huge increase over the current limitation of 2000 items.

My Sites have more social features. SharePoint tracks your comments on pages across the farm, others can add comments to your "wall", and you can build your own tags and tag clouds.

SharePoint 2010 will only run on a 64-bit Windows Operating System.

Office 2010 will support co-editing (multiple users can work on the same document at the same time via a web connector).

For Developers

Visual Studio 2010 allows you to see the SharePoint Server in Server Explorer, features can be developed in and deployed from VS 2010, and web parts can be developed with a Visual Designer and deployed to the server.

The SharePoint development environment can be loaded on Vista SP1 or Windows 7.

A SharePoint Site Definition Template has been added.

MasterPage development has changed (I don't know details on this yet).

Site definitions that include customizations to the MasterPages and customizations to the ONET.XML file will require work to upgrade from WSS or SharePoint 2007 to 2010.

A Developer Dashboard (based on site permissions) is available on every page for support purposes. This exposes performance stats and object details for the page. This should be a big help for support and debugging.

That's the highlights for the new products. Tomorrow, I will post details about SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.