Office 12 – SharePoint – data store enhancements
There are lots of changes to the data storage services in SharePoint 3, ie Office 12 System, these are the ones I noticed:
- Everything in WSS now seems to be built on the list type, this is really important as it means that all of the services and UI created for lists can now be leveraged everywhere in WSS
- Wide lists, lists in SharePoint 2 used to be limited to 60 columns, they are now unlimited
- All types of list now support folders
- Folders can now have properties
- Custom columns can now be indexed, this is useful because it allows views to be created to aid in the navigation of large lists, Microsoft recommend that although lists can have millions of entries, views are used to trim these large lists down to less than 2000 items when presented for visualisation in the UI
- Ability to create cross list queries, for example this capability is used to query across all of the lists on a site to find “my documents” and “my tasks”
- Support for bulk uploading
- If items are bulk uploaded without mandatory properties being populated, these items will be left in the checked out state. When documents are checked in you will be prompted to enter the mandatory properties
- Content types can be defined, which can then be used/reused when you create custom columns. These are defined at site level. if custom content types are created based on these optionally they can inherit changes made to their parents
