SQL Server 2012 Brings New Features and Capabilities for SharePoint 2010

Introduction
If you have SharePoint customer or architect and you really should be looking at the new SQL 2012 release. As we all know SharePoint success is highly contingent on SQL Server. You need a strong SQL Server deployment to ensure there is good performance, high availability, back up/recovery, etc. Additionally Microsoft delivers their Business Intelligence (BI) stack through SharePoint and there have been several new features and capabilities added there as well.
For SQL 2012 there are three areas where there have been major capability additions:

1. Mission Critical Confidence – This is the capability to more easily deliver high-availability with lower total cost of ownership.
2. Breakthrough Insight – New and expanded capabilities for Business Intelligence.
3. Cloud on Your Terms – Additional capabilities to create SQL databases in either the private or public cloud (Office 365).

In this blog I am going to cover some of the new SQL 2010 capabilities specifically focusing on how they can improve your SharePoint 2010 implementation. Please note that there are a lot of new capabilities for SQL Server 2012 which I have not covered such as data warehousing, resource management, full text searching, auditing, Big Data (Hadoop), etc. Here is a good reference to quickly spin up on all the new capabilities (“What's New in SQL Server 2012 Whitepaper” located here).
Mission Critical Confidence
AlwaysOn
First and foremost is the new high-availability solution in SQL Server 2012 called AlwaysOn. One of the first and foremost challenges that organizations face with deploying SharePoint 2010 is providing a solution architecture that will meet the SLA’s of their business users. Business processes, technical processes and Governance need to be put in place to ensure that SharePoint 2010 will be up as much as possible.
In the past with SQL Server 2008 R2, you employ such solutions as clustering, mirroring, log shipping and replication (my previous blog on this topic). However this could require a lot of planning, configuration, and management. With SQL 2012 AlwaysOn, new configuration wizards and tuning tools are now provided that makes set-up and configuration of High-Availability extremely simple.
The concept of Availability Groups have been added which specifically makes configuration of Database Mirroring easier. Availability Groups are a logical of databases that failover together. Through the configuration wizard, you can determine if you need such things as automatic or manual failover, set-up of primary and multiple secondary instances, synchronous or asynchronous data movement, etc.
Availability Groups remove the need for shared disk storage (SAN or NAS) for deployment of a failover cluster instance. Note that AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances support multiple-site clustering across subnets which subsequently enables cross datacenter failover.
This feature is very useful when setting up your SharePoint 2010 (or 2007) farm because High Availability is one of the most paramount tasks that are needed when setting up a mission critical SharePoint environment.
Recovery Advisor
Database Recovery Advisor provides many new features and capability for the support of back-up and restore of databases through SQL Server Management Studio. The new Recovery Advisor streamlines the back-up process. One such solution is a visual timeline that provides the backup history and all the available points in which you can restore from.
There is also new capability called Split File Backup which allows you to split a backup into multiple files. This allows for quicker backup and restores because they can be written and restored across disks running in parallel.
This is very helpful for improving the amount of time to work with large SharePoint 2010 (or 2007) Content Databases that have grown significantly.
Breakthrough Insight
As you probably already know SharePoint 2010 is where Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) stack is delivered. This is a combination of solutions such as Excel Services, PerformancePoint, Visio Services, Chart Web Parts (Dundas), PowerPivot, and SQL Reporting Services (SSRS). With the release of SQL 2012 a new solution called Power View is now provided, PowerPivot can now be done on SharePoint 2010 server side and there is significantly enhanced integration with SSRS.
Power View
Power View is a new highly interactive data exploration and reporting tool that allows business users to visually explore data, in an ad-hoc fashion. End users can create the reports/dashboards very quickly, create shapes/graphs with clicks, create animation, highlight capabilities based on rules, drill down relationships and performs very well with large datasets. The design environment is very similar to Office. It can be published through SharePoint 2010 as shown in the diagram below.
Note that Power View requires SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) to be integrated with SharePoint 2010 and there be an instance of SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (SSAS) or PowerPivot be available.
PowerPivot
Up to this point PowerPivot was a solution that was available through Excel client only via an Add-in. This is a really powerful, end user friendly capability that allows for data analytics. There are actually several new capabilities that have been introduced that I recommend you read up on (in references below).
Specifically to SharePoint 2010, PowerPivot for SharePoint is available as an add-in and can run server side in conjunction with Excel Services. This now allows end users the ability to publish PowerPivot reports through the browser allowing end users easy access to this data.

As well, in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration there is a new PowerPivot Management Dashboard that provides several reports on performance of reports.

SQL Reporting Services (SSRS)
Personally the enhancements to SSRS are very exciting to me as I have had to do configuration of SSRS with SharePoint 2007 and 2010 in the past in production environments. If you have done it before, you may recall it was tedious task of configuration the SSRS Configuration Wizard and getting Kerberos Authentication set-up correctly. Now with SQL Server 2012, configuration of SSRS with SharePoint 2010 is completely done through Central Administration. Additionally there is a new service in SharePoint 2010 that runs SSRS, it supports WCF/Claims authentication, integrated ULS logging, built in load balancing across SharePoint servers, report performance improvements and there are PowerShell commands for management.

Additionally there is a SSRS alerting capability that allows end users to subscribe to alerts that are associated to SSRS report. Users can create conditions for any report, and when they are met a notification will be sent to them.

One more last addition change is you may know that SSRS reports can generate Word or Excel Documents. Up to now, the file formats generated were either .doc or .xls which means they are not Open XML document renditions. With SQL Server 2012 and SSRS now .docx and .xlsx file types will now be generated.
Cloud on Your Terms
With SQL Server 2012, there are a bunch of new capabilities to support even tighter integration with SQL Azure. You will have a unified database development experience between SQL 2012 on-prem and SQL Server. The reason why I bring this up is because it is very common that when creating a solution inside SharePoint, you will have complex data management requirements that can be better supported with a SQL Server database instead of a SharePoint list.
Now we have the ability to more quickly and efficiently create custom database in SQL Azure which can be utilized with SharePoint 2010. Plus this is really good for working with Office 365 SharePoint Online because we can make a cloud to cloud connection to work with advanced data structures.
References

• SQL Server 2012 Technical Whitepapers - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/learning-center/resources.aspx. Specifically read “What’s New in SQL Server 2012 Whitepaper” and “SQL Server 2012 What’s New Breakthrough Insight Whitepaper”.
• SharePoint 2010 SP1 – Supports project Code Name “Denali” which is now SQL Server 2012 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460045
• SQL Server 2008 High Availability with SharePoint 2010 – Previous article that I wrote - http://www.astaticstate.com/2010/12/sharepoint-2010-high-availability-with.html.

Lync Online Ports

I recently stumbled across this new wiki entry and recalled I had some customers looking for answers on exactly how to set up the ports correctly for Lync Online in Office 365.
The first place a customer should check is Office 365 Deployment Guide - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26509. Specifically there is a section on Required Ports; however the direction of the ports are not specified.
Here is some additional information that will assist you with your Lync Online configuration:

• http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/lync/ensuring-your-network-works-with-lync-online.aspx – good article.
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2409256 – good article.
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg425882.aspx - Additionally, even though this is for Lync on-premise when working with external users, it is really the same concept when you think about. Your company/organization is an external user connecting to a Lync service which happens to be available through the Office 365 cloud.

SharePoint Online Updates Coming Soon

There was a public announcement that people whom are working with SharePoint Online with Office 365 should know about - http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1004
Around the corner will be releasing some new features and capabilities. These were things listed as current know issues for which we evaluated and pushed up in the queue:

• SharePoint Online will now support up to 500,000 user objects. Previously it was 20,000.
• Traditionally we think of the Recycle Bin as just for documents. Today we support the ability to restore sites. Now Site Collection restores will be supported as well.
• External collaboration is as well going to be extended. Today Office 365 support the ability to invite external people with Windows Live ID but the user must have a @Live.com, @Hotmail.com and @MSN.com email address. This currently means you are limited to a domain. What will be changing is now any email address that is associated to a Windows Live ID account can be utilized to gain access to an Office 365 Partner Site Collection. This means external partners can have email sent to their primary work mailbox. Simply put, if a person has a Windows Live ID, they can get access to a partner site. Very exciting.
• PFD Support is now better. Today Office 365 allows users to place PDFs in SharePoint Online document libraries, add metadata to them, put them through a workflow, publish them, search on them, etc. However the limitation that many customers asked for was the ability to open the PDF through the browser. This was perplexing to many SharePoint professionals because this is supported on premise. Actually by default, even SharePoint 2010 premise does not support unless there is a change made to the web app in central admin. Regardless the change has been made and PDFs can be opened in the browser.

The Office 365 SharePoint Online Service Descriptions have not been updated yet as the changes have not been rolled out just yet. They will be coming soon.

Office 365 Blackberry Support

This could be late news to some people however for Office 365 there was an announcement this month of some tighter integration with Blackberry. Here is a new press on it - http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5359
The “net” people should know about is that this service is available at no additional charge to current medium-sized or enterprise subscribers of the Office 365 suite or standalone Exchange Online and works with BlackBerry smartphones on business or consumer data plans.
This will ensure users can access email, calendar and organizer data from a Blackberry phone. Plus service has web-based management console that can provision, manage, and secure. Security features such as resetting passwords, and remote lock and wipe are supported.

Presence with Branded Master Pages

I have heavily used the starter branding master pages (http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/) for some projects I have done. It was brought to my attention that the Lync presence was not coming through.
After some research I found that if I replaced this:

<script type="text/javascript">
function ProcessImn(){}
function ProcessImnMarkers(){}        
</script>

With this:

<SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="init.js" OnDemand="true" runat="server"/>

The presence indicators came back.

Office 365 MT Service Change Wiki

Do you want to stay up to date, track or learn the updates with the Office 365 Multitenant Service? Here is a nice WIKI page that is being managed that is tracking, by month, what are the new service updates to the Office 365 Service - http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/office_365_service_updates/service-updates-for-office-365-for-enterprises.aspx

Blogging with SharePoint 2010

Someone just asked me a simple question if it was possible to blog with SharePoint 2o10 with a rich client application.  You can use Windows Liver Writer (http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-other-programs?T1=t5) which is part of Windows Essentials 2011 to write blogs for SharePoint 2010.  And it is free.  You can also use Microsoft Word to author blogs.

Here is Windows Liver Writer connected to a SharePoint 2010 Blog.


I press the Publish button and I have the following result.  Pretty easy.