SharePoint Conference Fun Fact

For those that are thinking about attending SharePoint Conference (SPC) in the spring, a little fact about this SPC. There are 300+ hours of content and 45+ hours of brand new hands-on labs. There are over 7000 attendees and the conference and hotel sold out 2 to 3 weeks before the conference.

SharePoint Conference Keynote

The SharePoint Conference kick-off with Steve Ballmer and his first time appearance at a SharePoint Conference was incredible. The next 2 hours was a whirl wind tour of features that would excite any public sector user. At its heart, SharePoint 2010 is going to scale to 100+ million of list items per document library or list, make connecting on any device or browser easier, allow for easy/fast connections to line-of-business, allow for enterprise management of taxonomy and document types (content types), provide a ReportBuilder Wizard, enable Document sets, and many other improvements that will help agencies be more Transparent.

Steve Ballmer/Jeff Teper Summary:

In his usual high energy presentation style, Steve drove home the following key messages:

• The goal of SharePoint 2010 is to drive the ability of technology to be a natural part of every moment of a day (meetings, symposiums, etc) to increase productivity and help us get out of the economic slowdown.
• Public Beta will be available in November.
• Cloud Integration – SharePoint Online Service and SharePoint 2010. SharePoint Online currently has over 1 Million users, updates quarterly, and hosting sizes well above 100,000 users. SharePoint 2010 wants to give you and your organization:
• Choice – Some things are in the cloud, some things are on-premise. You can mix and match, depending your needs.
• Depth – Includes Enterprise Features
• Proven – Large deployments. Years of experience of cloud services with high availability.

SharePoint Evolution

Many of you are familiar with the SharePoint feature wheel for MOSS 2007. However, this still left users struggling to understand what SharePoint was. So, SharePoint 2010 will now be talked about in how it solves 6 core scenarios/pillars of businesses instead of as a set of features. This will also help users and analysts map our best-of-breed and best-of-solution to the core pillars.

Here is a little more of an explanation of the newest concept “Composites”:

• Ease of creating Composite applications.
• Integrated Development Tools, Enhances Extensibility, Broad Support for Standards. Goal is to increase speed to solution and rapidly respond to business needs.
• XHTML, WCAG (Accessibility), REST, JSON, ATOM, and More…
• Support SharePoint Development of SharePoint on Windows 7 and Vista.
• BCS: Business Connectivity Services – This is new and improved Business Data Connector.
• Connect Line-of-business to SharePoint without any code through SharePoint Designer 2010 Wizard (5 clicks). Looks like a SharePoint list using a new “External List”. Available in SharePoint web experience and creates an External Links folder in Outlook as contact information.

VS2010 New Tools:

Below is a summary of new tools to help speed rapid development of solutions on SharePoint:

• New VS Templates: Site Definitions, Web Parts, Workflow, etc with Team Foundation Server integration
• SharePoint 2010 shows up in Server Explorer in VS2010. Wizards for Feature deployment at any level.
• Easy one-click debug, deployment, activation, installation, etc
• Developer Dashboard: Diagnostics, page load, SQL calls, etc help track down developer induced performance issues.

Overall, the investment we saw in making SharePoint development easy, fast, secure, and powerful was incredible.

-Your FedPosse