Recently some documentation (finally) came available about how you can store huge files external to your SharePoint SQL database while using the rich feature set of SharePoint as an enhanced information store. To actually get this working you will need to implement a COM interface (ISPExternalBinaryProvider), which will keep your external storage and the SQL Content database(which will contain a pointer to the data as well as metadata about the object) in sync.
Available information:
I touched upon the topic of doing global SharePoint deployments a couple of weeks ago in SharePoint - Branch Deployment and WAN optimization . A new white paper is available about it now - Plan to deploy Office SharePoint Server globally - but Joel also provided an avant-preview with his blog post about Global SharePoint Deployment Partner Solutions.
Apparently Bill Gates talked for the first time about "Office 14" at the Office Developer Conference - here's a small excerpt from the Infoworld article - 'Office 14' to be more Web-friendly, Gates says .
"Outlook Web Access is not the full version of Office, but if you want to go into a kiosk or an Internet cafe and browse and connect, it gives you plenty of functionality," he said. "As we look at all the modules [in Office 14], we have in mind the equivalent of Outlook Web Access," Gates said.
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Outlook Web Access is a part of Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 software, and it was unclear how the other Office 14 applications would be packaged and delivered. Gates did say that SharePoint Server, which is becoming more closely aligned with Office, "will be able to render a greater set of Office documents in an HTML environment."
Some more hints are shared in Office 14 to add more online document sharing. Apparently there were some nice info-nuggets in the Q&A after the keynote as well - Office DevCon - BillG Keynote - especially take a look at the stuff marked in bold...
Q - Customising MOSS is sometimes harder to do vs just build from scratch on ASP.NET
A - There is a huge thing that I am very keen on driving is that our richest data store by far is SQL Server. Big theme in the next version of SharePoint is to let you manipulate actual SQL tables as lists (insert fanfare audio), you don't give up the ability to have lightweight lists like today but these will be 'super' lists. A big theme is how much split there is between .NET and SharePoint - how much is stored within SharePoint versus SharePoint being the user interface (UI) for incredibly rich data structures that exist natively underneath. (Bill became quite animated again - it's them data connections...)
Looks like fancy stuff but what do you want in the next version of Office and SharePoint ... leave a comment to add your feedback.
Just a number of online resources about building workflow in SharePoint:
Shameless plug: If you need some offline resources - don't forget to take a look at Real World SharePoint 2007 which contains 2 chapters about workflow development...
Update: David Mann just pointed to his blog about SharePoint workflow development - I just skimmed through it ... lots of must reads.
