10/24/2009After arriving home from Las Vegas on Thursday night, I started reviewing all the documents, vendor advertisements and session videos from the 2009 SharePoint Conference and came to the conclusion that learning SharePoint 2010 is going to be similar to learning an entirely new product. The reason why I believe this is that the user experience (UX) is significantly changed (and improved), the way developer's will use the product is more inline with a "finished" solution, no more modifying XML files to build solutions and features, and the amount of new Business Intelligence (BI) additions will change the way business users will adopt the product. The first session I replayed was related to Visual Studio 2010 and the major improvements, which will allow Solution Architects and Developers to deploy SharePoint Solutions much quicker and with less pain. Adding a feature, event receiver or solution is started as simply as right-clicking within the project and walking through the steps to complete. There is also a new "Visual Web Part" mode which allows developers to drag-and-drop controls onto the design area and complete tasks without writing as much code as previously needed. The next session I reviewed was a PowerPivot and BI review and I think this one area will encourage the migration from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 from a business case point of view. The significant Return on Investment (ROI) gained from having Line-of-Business (LOB) via Business Connectivity Services (BCS) will be a boon to businesses, data analysts and developers alike. Connecting the BCS is much more simplified and now can read information, as well as, write back data to LOB data sources. This is was a very big factor in companies that I worked with not deploying or even consider using the feature in SharePoint, this will change that perception now. PowerPivot will also remove the single point-of-failure that exists by business users retaining information on their desktop and now will expose their entire workgroups. Negatively, based on questions raised during the Key Note session with Steve Ballmer and Tom Rizzo (Senior Director of SharePoint) the tools specifically built for SharePoint 2010 cannot be used in the MOSS 2007 environment. This means SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 will only support the SharePoint 2010 SKUs and means developers and designers must use two different products to support their mixed environments. Also, Microsoft had made a decision to only deploy the server-based products to 64-bit platforms and with the way IT budgets are stretched I believe adoption will be relatively slow for the mid-sized and some Enterprise-sized companies. If the product was to be released in the middle of 2010, it might benefit from pent-up demand of the past few year's financial crisis and be streamed into the budget process. It could go either way, depends how quickly the global economies rebound. This all being said, I believe now that the 2009 SharePoint Conference is complete there is much work to be done in both products (2007 and 2010) and know that for me and my company that building solutions in both will pay tremendous advantages in the short- mid- and long-term. SharePoint 2010 is very impressive and I hope by Thanksgiving that I will be able to start participating in the Public Beta and share my experiences in this blog, articles I will write, and conferences I will speak at. 10/22/2009Day 3 started off with back-to-back high-quality sessions around SharePoint Governance and Planning and Intranet best practices. After being involved (at various levels) with three major Enterprise-level SharePoint deployments, it was great to listen in on experts talk about the same pain and issues that I had experienced in the past. The sessions were in-depth and made me think about how the process of governance could be improved on. SharePoint Governance: The first concept was building many web applications which serve different purposes. The example I can wrap my head around is when different departments have disparate needs: one wants short-term collaboration, another wants application functionality with Excel Services, and another wants to build their own web parts, so creating different web applications with different rules could be a stream-lined way to manage these sites. The initial thought would be that requires too much planning and work, but really seems to be a time-saving because a user will understand the rules in their Web Application and build accordingly. As for the IT group, they also know what exists in which area. Intranet Best Practices: Second session was solely focused around Intranet best practices and centered around planning, communication, solving business needs versus providing technology solutions, and Information Architecture. The main take-away from this was that the business should drive Intranet creation and it’s very important to have an Executive that supports the goals (I totally agree with this), not IT, not a small group. An Intranet is a huge undertaking so it really needs executive support. There was a case study which showed how Del Monte USA created a successful, employee-process driven site and used many best practices and keep an iterative cycle of development. Microsoft Services Online for SharePoint: Another session on the agenda was the case study of Coca-Cola Bottling centered in Atlanta. Their story was that their evaluation of the MSO platform, their acceptance of the pros and cons, and embracing the platform for all its potential. The Coca-Cola Company used the Cloud service for their intranet and collaboration in impressive style. The sites were branded, customized, and followed a proper development cycle within the Microsoft environment. MSO is just SharePoint, but there are a bunch of restrictions and other considerations that need to be taken into view when customizing the User Experience (UX). The company accounted for growth and seems to be able to grow their investment with the newest features coming in SharePoint 2010. I will blog more about MSO in the future, specifically about licensing and the future 2010 offering. “Ask the Experts”: This was a special event where all of the different Microsoft teams answered attendee questions on a personal basis, everything from MSDN Documentation and Licensing to InfoPath Forms and SharePoint Storage and Capacity Planning. I asked a couple questions related to licensing and SharePoint Online and the Microsoft staff answered questions presented to them. It was a great opportunity, because there are very few times you can talk to the engineers who developed the products. Thanks Microsoft. Tomorrow is a half-day, so I will wrap up my Day 4 post during my time waiting for my 10:45 PT flight to depart for the Queen City (Charlotte, NC). 10/21/2009It was a mixed bag Day 2 of the SharePoint Conference, I attended a bunch of sessions about the visualization of Line-of-Business (LOB) data, social networking and Business Connectivity Services. Of course the social networking features and governance appeared to be most popular and covered the topics of rollout to My Sites and other components, like the Silverlight Organization Chart. My best session was the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) discussion which shows the biggest potential pulling data into the SharePoint environment. Previously, the Business Data Catalog (BDC) was a good start in that the technology could retrieve read-only data, but the process required a large amount of configuration. BCS appears to make the developer experience much easier and the amount of configuration has been significantly reduced. The next feature improvement is that BCS data is read-write, so the types of applications and work processes can be rapidly deployed. Social networking drew the biggest attention and will continue to drive SharePoint adoption. Sessions centered around the technology and the business use and governance. Social networking, I have found, is hit or miss in the Enterprise, it’s all about the Executive Sponsor and how the corporate culture wants to participate in the area of collaboration. Microsoft hosted a “Night at the Beach” at the Mandalay Bay beach, which had music entertainment by Huey Lewis and the News. Everything was great and the event was hosted by KnowledgeLake and Toshiba. Thanks for the open bar and probably 5000+ attendees. Finally, it was great to catch up with a bunch of people that I follow on Twitter. I met Rob Foster and spoke to him for a while walking back to the Luxor hotel. Rob (as well as, Brett Lonsdale and Nick Swan from Lightning Tools) hosts the "SharePoint Pod Show” and does a great job sharing interviews and information from the SharePoint community. Also was able to get a Joel Oleson-signed copy of Michael Sampson’s “SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration: Using SharePoint to Enhance Business Collaboration. Thank you Quest Software, I will start reading that on the flight home to Charlotte. 10/20/2009Looking at the blogosphere today, there is a bunch of chatter about Microsoft’s unveiling of Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2010 (Twenty-ten) so I am not going to review all the technical details but provide a summary of the overall events of the conference. The conference-goers started the day with a two and a half hour key note filled with demos, information, and hype of the new product. Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) was the big name leading the charge with Tom Rizzo (Senior Director of SharePoint), followed by Jeff Teper (Corporate VP of the Office Business Platform). There were videos, product announcements (PowerPivot) and general strategy discussions. Ballmer seemed quite happy that he didn’t have to discuss the current economic conditions and was able to focus on the flagship collaboration platform. He seemed genuinely excited about the almost 100% increase in the conference and placed the value of the product on the SharePoint community. Ballmer and company must have mentioned Microsoft’s Online strategy more than 50 times during the keynote. After lunch, sessions began and the first one I attended was the “Microsoft Business Intelligence Vision and Strategy” session which outlined Microsoft’s goal of moving the BI product SKU above the 20% market share it currently has at this time. The new product, PowerPivot, is a new tool in the arsenal of the Information Worker which uses server-side technologies and creates a User Experience (UX) with an Excel feel. The demo was very impressive, the presenter pulled over 101 MILLION records to his desktop in the blink of an eye and then sorted based on a field. The experience is enhanced by the compression which allows these 101+ million records to a somewhat manageable size of 162 MB. This new product should entice business users to build Office apps that allow visibility to the data they need, when they need it. Next up was the “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Overview: Following in the footsteps of WSS”. So as the title explains, Windows SharePoint Services is now named Microsoft SharePoint Foundation. There some basics explained from a migration point-of-view, controlled migration options and an overview of the Administration UX and the other UX features. Very impressive engineering on the part of Microsoft, the UI is very smooth and mature for SharePoint now and includes a common Ribbon interface that users should be comfortable with in the future. We did learn that the 2010 tools would only function in the 2010 environment, the good news is that development within SharePoint can be done on a local machine versus a virtual machine with a 64-bit OS (now a requirement). Last session of my day was “Introduction to SharePoint Applications Using InfoPath Form Services 2010”, which was quite a step up from the current toolset. InfoPath 2010 seems to remove the limitations of data connections via the browser and other UI features which will become a staple out of the box. Very good session, but I am looking to test the product when the Beta is released next month (Nov 2009). Today was basically overviews, but the good note is that I will be able to catch all of the 250 sessions when the video streams are released in the next few days. Looking forward to see what I missed. Tomorrow, I have more technical sessions and will provide a more in-depth overview. I visited a bunch of vendors and saw or met a bunch of people I had worked with in the past, it was a great day. |
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