Reflections on the SharePoint Conference 2008
Just back from the final sessions at this year’s conference.
For me this has been a week very well spent. My head is full of new information and ideas, I have made some great contacts, caught up with old friends and gained a two new MS certifications (MOSS dev and config). :)
As I mentioned in an earlier post I noticed a shift in the content with a growing emphasis on the softer aspects of the technology; not just nuts and bolts but users and uses. I think that this is partly due to the growing body of experience, not least Microsoft’s own. I understand they are the world’s biggest users of SharePoint (no surprises there I guess); they have 325 thousand Portals, sites and Team sites in the business. I have noticed the results of this experience of using the technology for business gain coming through in their sessions. After all the tech guys are also the users in this case and as a result their presentations have an increased maturity about them.
Plenty of announcements made here, including; BizTalk Adapter Pack, Capacity Planning Tool, Extranet Accelerator Kit, Search Server Express released, and the Asset Inventory tool. To name just a few.
Plenty going on in the Partners exhibition hall, despite the seemingly low number of places avaialable. My impression was that Business Process Management related vendors were the largest group. There were also plenty of Training, Document Management, and Migration related partners. The standard of presentations on the stands was very high and all the partners who I stopped and talked to really knew their stuff. Might sound obvious, but it's not always the case at these events. Some of the Partner led sessions and stands in Berlin last year were poor. Perhaps another example of an increasingly maturing market?
The SharePoint based Conference site has worked well. It provided a handy-dandy session browser to plan which events to go to; it even integrated with Outlook. Most impressively I can already find most the slide decks on the site. I still have not got my DVD from last year’s event which had the slide decks on!
It was not all good news though. A few people I know who work in the Partner community and do deep dive hands on work with SharePoint day in and day out were very disappointed with the technical level of the sessions. One, who shall remain nameless, walked out of almost every session I saw him in disgust. To be fair for those working at the top level, who already know the product from the ground up are not going to learn that much at an event like this which is aimed at the mass market. Plus this wasn't a development event, that was held last month. Still, a level 400 session should be a deep as it can get.
Seattle is great, especially for Vegetarians and Vegans. Much better than Las Vegas where the DevConnections event was held, at least in my humble opinion.
I recommend the event for next year, as long as it's not in Vegas! There really is a strong business case for it, so start planning to now so you can convince the boss. In the meantime I heard a rumour that the UK will be getting a 'Virtual SharePoint Conference' later this year, but no official announcement yet...
Couple of days off now before flying home on Saturday. That'll just give me time to write up my notes and all those new ideas.....
Regards,
S:)