Well I was one of the many people who attended PDC this year. The slide downloads are now available. I am not going to summarise the newly announced features as there have been many blogs on that already. Heather Solomon has a a great summary of Office 12 resources. Instead I intend to give my own stance on what I glean on Portal(SPS) and Enterprise Content Management Server (ECM). Most of the information at the PDC covered WSS, Search and ECM - so what did I glean about SPS, particularly by using the virtual machine images as provided in the Hands-on-labs (HOL)?
With any new versions things will go, features will appear under a different guise and other aspects will resurface from previous versions. This seems true of the next versions of SPS and ECM. So hear are some findings - Health warning - the Office 12 virtual machine image I saw, is pre-beta and of course what features are in the RTM is unknown by me!
Areas/Channels
These now are the same thing, i.e., webs. These webs are enhanced WSS webs, but this time round we haven't lost the WSS ability to set security at the library or list level, and now because WSS provide security at an item/document level - SPS/ECM webs have that too. Now what features make up SPS in contrast to features that were ECM is not clear, but on the machine image as presented at PDC, SPS/ECM webs made heavy use of pages stored in a document library named "Pages". These pages used the ASP.Net 2 master/slave functionality. You can specify which page within the document library is the web's default - home page. There is also a check box so you can include pages as part of the navigation, i.e., the top and side navigation controls are not limited to webs. Using a "Pages" document library is not new to WSS, in fact Meeting workspaces use a "Pages" document library for it's tabbed pages.
There is no bucket system for the URLs as was the case for SPS Areas. And there still seemed to be the ability to move SPS/ECM webs around so you can rearrange your portal's navigational taxonomy to meet the changing needs of an organisation. There was a link to a feature "Change Navigation", which allowed you to edit, sort, move up and down the webs (and pages).
To achieve a tab behaviour within a page, lists are used, which refer to the tab page, also stored in the "Pages" document library. Another advantage of the "Pages" library is that you have all the functionality of a WSS library - versioning, checkin, checkout, item level permissions, together with the extra ECM features such as "Submit for Approval", "Reject", "Approve", etc. There was also a Tools link - Spelling, Preview and Check for Unpublished Items.
Listings
Listings don't look that they are there under the same guise as in SPS 2003. What I did see was that each SPS/ECM web had something called "Related Links" - this may be the replacement for Listings - but it didn't seem that you could apply audiences to them. Audiences look like they can only be applied to Web Parts. Audiences seemed to be enhanced. You can now base an audience on a distribution list and something called "Global Audiences" and "SharePoint Groups".
The "Grouped Listings" web part and it's other incarnations (News for You, Latest News, etc.) were there in the Web Part Gallery but when I tried to add them to a Web Part page, I got a serialisation error - which if listings do not exist you would expect some problems. The "Group Listings" web part functionality may be replaced by the new "Summary" web parts and Search capabilities. However, if you made use of the ability of adding a listing by entering text, then it looks like you should use pages in the next version. If Listings have disappeared I will be interested in the migration solutions for current SPS 2003 users.
ECM Internet authoring
This looked great. A feature returning from a previous CMS, i.e., the ability to author on the intranet and then deploy a read only copy to the Internet web site. Full and incremental deployments are allowed. Also it is not a web scrap feature - webs, lists and library, together with their content get deployed. One thing I would like to test out but didn't have the time, is: if you have a page with both a ECM placeholder and a web part zone, and then in the web part zone you place, say, a list view web part and seeing if an incremental deployment picks up amendments to the list that matched the list view web part, without changing the page.
So this was my little blog trip on Office 12 at PDC. I look forward to getting hold of the beta and hearing more from Microsoft on SharePoint vNext. IT Forum in Europe, 15-17 November, will contain more SharePoint announcements, this time it will be infrastructure/administration focused.