The first session wasn’t really worth blogging about but there are many enhancements and new capabilities in the User Profile space. It sure seems like MS has listened to the users and customers regarding the Profile Stores.

Profile Store:

There are now hierarchies in the user profile such as sub type for profile and organization. What does this mean?

• Now you can have different profile properties for different sub-type. this gives you more control over property hierarchy.
• there is a new concept of organization. you can use these groups as any other group in SharePoint and create your organizational hierarchy. I am not sure how useful this will be as you have to manually keep track of the owners, site urls and owners.
• Profiles are not taxonomic and tied to the Enterprise Metadata.

Profile Sync: (READ on you will like what you read here)

Sync story is a good story for all of us. There are a lot of enhancements and new capabilities with profile syncing. Some highlights below.

• Now the sync engine supports not just Active Directory but FBA and Claims authority.
• It uses Forefront and ILM technologies to sync vs. using search in MOSS 2007.
• You can also use the BCS infrastructure and BDC connectors to sync external users. this brings tremendous capability in terms of being able to use anything provided by the Connector Framework OOB or custom BDC connection. You can even do a duplicate collapse of user that exist in two systems but represents the same user.

Migration Disclaimer:

For migration the old 2007 sync configuration is not brought in. The profile database is migrated but you have to manually re-create the sync configuration. We can’t always expect backward compatibility and exponential enhancements. I would go with enhancements for a little trouble when it is of this magnitude.

More to come.