It 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.