A Technical Architects View

I was asked to put together a demonstration for a customer this week with 48hrs notice. My colleagues and I thought the only way we could do anything in time was to use smoke and mirrors everywhere. However, it turned out that we actually built the demonstration using SharePoint 2010, without any smoke and mirrors, within the 48 hrs. What we all agreed afterwards was that we could not have built the same functionality within the 48 hours if we had tried to use MOSS 2007. The demonstration included user profiles, search, calendars, organisation charts as well as the usual mocked up pages, except they we not mocked up they were real pages with real data. In the end we hardly wrote a line of code because all we needed was out of the box functionality. The user profiles worked, search worked, people search worked, the organisation charts worked using data from Active Directory and so the User profile Synchronisation had to work. The Out of the Box functionality of SharePoint 2010 is now so great that I suspect a lot of projects will just need this. There would always be space for the developers and their C# but I would again suspect that they will not need to write as much as they did for MOSS 2007 to achieve the same end.

Certainly creating demonstrations with SharePoint 2010 is a lot easier than it was with MOSS 2007.