After 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.