Sharepoint conference - AP

Real Change in the News IndustryAssociated Press and the Office 2010 Platform

Chad Schorr, Director Newsroom TechnologyDoug Denner, Newsroom Technology ArchitectAssociated Press

Agenda

Introduction to the Associated Press (demo)

Industry and Technology Challenges

Office 2010: An Editorial System?

SharePoint Deep Dive (demo)

Tweet questions and feedback to: @APatSPC

But First… Why Do You Care?

What is intriguing about AP’s implementation of SharePoint 2010?

Real time editing across a global footprintThe mission critical core of our newsroomLarge content turnover. 60k docs a dayWe’re integrating Microsoft FAST ESP, not FAST for SharePointSharePoint will not be the UI

Largest and oldest news gathering organization in the world

4,100 employees. 243 bureaus in 97 countries.49 Pulitzer Prizes1,700 U.S. members5,000 International subscribers

On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from AP

What is AP News?

Publishing a Story

End to end news filing scenario

demo

Newsroom Challenges

Demand shifted from content verticals to packages of related multimedia content

Linking and association become more important to newsroom workflow

Communication/CollaborationVirtualization of the news desk

News product landscape can change faster than the news

Metadata becomes increasingly vitalThere used to be a person at the other end

Legacy Technology Challenges

Our current system is completely distributed with no central storage

Collaboration is based on file sharingMany copies of the same story eventually need to be aggregated

Technology creates artificial walls between workgroupsExpensive to extend and maintain

The user interface is 100% customNo version management

Why Office 2010?

We considered several solution options

Rebuild everything from scratchPurchase a turnkey solutionHybrid - select a framework technology and customize as appropriate

Two thirds of our requirements were met out of the box with Office, Communicator and ExchangeOffice allows us to focus on the business rules that make AP unique

Key SharePoint Features for AP

Managing concurrent work and document versions

Co-Authoring versus Check-In Merging Model

Search driven replicationClose to real time discovery of remote work

Communicator and Exchange integrationHot deployment modelSite failover with geographic distributionSharePoint as a server and not as a front end application

The Journalist UI

Word 2010 Add-In

demo

Why Word 2010?

Remote Differential Compression sends less data over the wire

Quite useful for remote users with limited bandwidth

Office Document CacheAsynchronous file I/O unblocks our users

PerformanceRunning Word is fasterAggressive document open targets

Publish and Transform

Using the OpenXML SDK to Integrate

demo

Integration and Extensibility

Makes it easy to transform from the Office format to your own formatEliminates any need to have Office client installed server sideEnables bi-directional transforms so we can pull back material from our content archive and display in WordKeeps us at a safe distance from docx internals

FAST ESB Integration

demo

Architecting for Performance

New content needs to be available for our user’s searches within seconds of publishingSharePoint crawling and traditional replication methods do not meet our performance requirementsFAST ESP provides us a more customizable platform for ingesting content as it’s producedUsing event receivers and service broker to replicate content between multiple FAST instances

Search Abstraction

Created an internal, T-SQL based query languageShielding users from the multiple sources of content

SharePoint listsFAST full text for newsroom contentAutonomy indices for archived contentAutonomy indices for multimedia content to link

Search Abstraction

request.SearchQuery = new SearchQuery();

request.SearchQuery.Query = "select top(1,50) * from FAST where filters('Obama AND mediatype=text') order by ARRIVALDATETIME DESC option( spellcheck=false, highlight=false )";

Concurrent Workflow and Versioning

Breaking news collaboration doesn’t fit cleanly within the co-authoring model

Partial updates are evil – new versions replace, they do not mergeAny amount of latency interferes with very quick deadlinesRace conditions: Users need assurance that their story will move as-is

Users work on their own private snapshot and overwrite the latest revision

Last commit wins

Concurrent Workflow

Using document sets to manage snapshots

demo

Remember to fill out your evaluations on MySPC for your

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Learn More about SharePoint 2010

Information forIT Prosat TechNet

http://MSSharePointITPro.com

Information forDevelopers

at MSDNhttp://MSSharePointDeveloper.com

Information forEveryone

http://SharePoint.Microsoft.com

Are we at the start of Office as a development platform?

Why now?A fundamental shift in thinking from the Office team that had for some time considered platform/file format to be a guarded secret. We all use Office, why not build more client applications on a platform with 20 years of end user experience.SharePoint as a BackOffice server.Thou shalt build Web Apps! With virtualization, Office installations can be as easy as the web.

Great example is Gemini.Today is good. Tomorrow will only be better.

Appendix

Sample Demonstration Screen Grabs

Publishing a Story, 1



The Journalist UI

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