Day 1 of the SharePoint Conference 2008
SharePoint conference 2008 opened this morning with Keynote speeches from Bill Gates, Kurt Delbene Vice President of the Office Business Platform Group.
Unfortunately I am having to spend far too much time sitting in my hotel room working on this trip, so I don't have time to give a detailed review; but here are a few headlines:
First some info on the event its self:
- 3,800 attendees at the conference
- 500 people on the waiting list
- 22 countries represented
- 61 partners exhibiting - the partner sponsorship sold out in 24 hours
Some SharePoint facts:
- SharePoint has now joined SQL and Exchange as a billion dollar server product
- Expecting to hit 100 million SharePoint licenses this year
- Bill noted that this puts SharePoint in a different league to specialist point solutions in the markets such as ECM, BI, Collaboration
Announcement: SharePoint as a hosted service
- SharePoint and Exchange are now available as a hosted service to organisations with less than 5000 seats. Here's the link, check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.mspx
- We were given a pretty compelling demonstration of how an organisation can combine a locally hosted Active Directory with a hosted Exchange and SharePoint implementation running in the Microsoft Data Centre.
- If this is the future then where exactly do the Microsoft Partner Community fit in I wonder? It has clear benefits for MS in terms of controlling licenses.
Announcement: MS Search Server Express released today
- Following the announcement of Search server Express beta at the DevConnections conference in November last year, the product is fully released and ready for down load today
The next version of SharePoint:
- Not much on this so far but in the Q&A session Bill talked a lot about the ability to surface SQL tables in the SharePoint environment and the ability to create a SharePoint list and declare it as a native SQL table. This, he claimed, will bring together the richness of SharePoint lists with the functionality of relational database tables.
- This will certainly see SharePoint develop further as a fully fledged Application Development platform.
- There was a brief mention of the further development of the BDC as the technology of choice for accessing backend data systems. We had been wondering if the Fast acquisition would signal the end for the BDC as we currently know it, but it seems not.
Increased support for deploying SharePoint:
- We were given demos and overviews of four solution accelerators recently developed for SharePoint
- The SPConfigurator for deploying .wsp, content types, master pages, audit settings and the like across one or more SharePoint farms
- Asset inventory tool which scans your network or IP range and produces a SQL server based report showing all SharePoint assets and content it finds. Very nice, I like this a lot!
- The Capacity Planner tool. This has been around a while now, must be several weeks at least, provides a wizard for inputting information and assessing the capacity of a given SharePoint farm topology.
- The Extranet Accelerator kit. Uses forms and workflows to enable users to quickly provision Extranet sites from SharePoint.
Announcement: Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint
- Some very nice demos of rich internet applications using SharePoint and silverlight
- Announcement of the release of a Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint which includes guidance and code to integrate Silverlight into SharePoint web parts.
- I was a non-believer in Silverlight unitl today, they are winning me over
By midday my head was spinning with too much new information! SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint. Where will it end????
Oh yes, I also took advantage of the free Prometric tests which are available here and I am now a certified MOSS Technical Specialist. I am going to hang the certificate on my wall next to my 100m swimming certificate and Cycling Proficiency badge.
The backpack is a briefcase style bag, and the Microsoft branded water bottle was a huge disappointment
More news as it breaks....
S:)