Reporting from DevConnections / SharePoint Connections Conference: Opening Key note highlights
Just back from the opening Key Note Speech here at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas. Steve Guggenheimer, General Manager Server & Tools Marketing at Microsoft, addressed an audience of 5000+ developers and IT professionals with an hour long presentation entitled "Dynamic IT and the 2008 Launch Wave". Tough audience!
As the name suggests the focus of the speech was on the upcoming releases of MS technologies, and with the current SharePoint technologies a year old SharePoint hardly got a mention. It's so old hat already!
The technology focus was on Visual Studio 2008 (due for release in Q4 2007), Windows Server 2008 (due for WW release on Feb 27th 2008), and SQL Server 2008 (due for release Q2 2008). We got ten minute demos on each from the product managers.
Microsoft were keen to emphasise that they "eat their own dog food", with the Microsoft.com site, one of the top ten visited sites in the world, already running on the Enterprise class, secure and trusted platform created by the aforementioned new technologies. Apparently the site has been using SQL Server 2008 Beta 3 for the past six months. Much was made of the fact that VS2008 had been built using VS2005. They claim that the new version can produce increases in productivity AND quality. I can already hear the cries of disbelief from Project Managers "Time, Cost or Quality. You can't improve all three!"
The Windows Server 2008 demo focused on the Virtualisation features. SharePoint wasn't mentioned specifically in the demo but judging by the increasing number of clients which are asking me about SharePoint in a virtual environment this will become a key area of interest for us in SharePoint land. Plus of course WinServer08 includes IIS 7.0. which features a very nice new UI. Gone are the endlessly tabbed dialog boxes for IIS admin, they are replaced by a nice, clean Office like UI. The scenario based demo featured a financial company with two offices, which then acquired a third thus increasing the load on the corporate web site by a third. Within 2 or three minutes we were shown how easy it is to add a new virtual Web Server to the farm and then to implement and configure failover clustering. Not my area of expertise but it looked far simpler than I remember from working with WinServer03 and it was very well received by the audience. For the SharePoint people the demo finished with the creation of a virtual application which the users accessed through a SharePoint based web part. V. nice!
The SQL Server 2008 demo covered some of the new data types. Using the new geospatial data type the presenter showed how to store the location of coffee shops in Seattle in SQL server and then created queries such as "show me all the coffee shops within 1000 metres of a particular road. The results were plotted on a map. Again V. Nice demo.
We were also treated to a Silverlight demo using Expression Designer, Expression Blend, VS and Expression Encoder. Now I don't know about everyone else but I am so busy trying to keep up with developments in good old fashioned products like Office and SharePoint that this Silverlight stuff from a design background is still a bit of a mystery! I get the general idea of rich web applications etc, but I'll be interested to see how long it takes for those controlling IT budgets to become convinced that data visualisation is an area which can deliver real business benefit or Return On Investment. The Microsoft demos I have seen so far feature a Golf Score vista gadget, trailers for the Fantastic Four film and today's demo was a weather report with animated sun and clouds. Looks great, but lacks commercial impact I feel. Does anyone else have any real world scenarios for this stuff? I'd be interested to hear them.
The session closed with a quick mention of the next new product suite codenamed "Oslo" which includes: BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1, Visual Studio 10, System Centre 5 and .NET framework 4.
The key message from Microsoft is that their vision is to take the existing best of breed products and to link them all together, "building bridges" between IT roles such as developers, administrators, testers, the business and of course the users. As SharePoint experts we will all need to develop a broader understanding of how the Microsoft product stack is evolving and how it all fits together to deliver Enterprise Class IT infrastructure.
More SharePoint specific stuff tomorrow...
Regards,
SJ