SharePoint on SharePoint – Under the Hood

The SharePoint Team Blog just announced they’ve launched the www.microsoft.com/sharepoint site on SharePoint itself with a large sprinkling of Silverlight. The post mentions the use of the publishing feature and SEO optimisation so I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find any really cool, secret WCM optimisations. I’m disappointed and can’t suggest modelling your own internet-facing MOSS site on this site :-(

• Looking at the site URL alone I can tell this is a MOSS site: /pages/default.aspx. I was hoping to see the /pages directory magically vamoosed from the URL and I’d hardly say Default.aspx is SEO-friendly.
• The total page weight, according to YSlow, is 538.5KB, which translates into a load time of 13.81s from Western Australia and a grade of F (despite waiting for the Silverlight banner to load the page load time didn’t feel too bad but reloading with an unprimed browser cache was sluggish but I have little doubt they’re running off a CDN)
• The JavaScript and CSS aren’t minified and both init.js and core.css are loaded in their entirety.
• The number of resources requested by the page is significant and there’s been no apparent effort to merge CSS and JS files
• The page viewstate equates to 62KB of the overall page weight while another 68KB pertains to inline Silverlight load script stuff

The single neat-o thing about this site (let’s say apart from its content and this is a technical blog) is the way hitting the Login link or trying to hit /_layouts/settings.aspx redirect to the Live login form. It would be interesting to know if they’re actually using Passport authentication on this site.