Looking 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.