SharePoint 2009 Conference: Morning Keynotes

Notes from Steve Ballmer keynote...

• Vision: seamless experiences across your life
• SharePoint is at the center of intranet, Internet, etc
• Public Beta in November
• Synergies with SharePoint Workspace (Groove recast for SharePoint with improved offline support)
• Targeting 1H2010 for general release (note: my guess is May)
• What is SharePoint? Collaboration, analytics, social networking, content management, portal, workflow, etc etc
• Want to someday bring SharePoint to consumer market
• New user experience for SP2010 - ribbon and other office UI elements
• Consolidate workloads and costs on a single platform (old argument but more so with this release)
• Adding sandbox environment
• Additional standards support (REST, JSON, ATOM) Note: Encouraging widespread development of third-party applications (e.g., Adobe AIR) that front-end SP2010 via these standards might be one of the most significant advancements in the release and Microsoft doesn't push this concept strongly enough - look at all the AIR apps around other social tools for instance
• Demo
  • Business Connectivity Services (next generation of business data catalog)
  • Many more templates within Visual Studio specific to SharePoint
  • Sandbox solution:enable developers to create applications that can be throttled by IT ... isolate application ...
• Note: so far, 45 minutes into keynote, not a single message that would be considered a message to a "business decision maker" - interesting ... pitching to developers and support people in audience, no focus on business solutions, processes, etc (few side comments but nothing in-depth and compelling)
• Cloud, discussion on hybrid split between SP online and SP on-premises
• Important: Still no parity still between SP2010 in cloud and on-premises - better, but not 100%
• Note: When will cloud/SaaS be the primary target environment for SP releases? Seems like on-premises is the target environment creating this lag in terms of parity
• Internet-facing SP: SP in cloud for intranet different than customer-facing Internet
• First real business scenario: Kraft example, consolidated 200 web sites. Volvo also using SP externally for Internet. Not clear what percentage though in these examples are SP - are they 100% run on SP or other platforms are also leveraged
• Demo Internet Facing
  • SharePoint Server For Internet Sites
  • FAST Search Server for Internet Business
• Intranet 2010 Products
  • SharePoint Foundation (successor to WSS)
  • SharePoint Server
  • Fast Search Server
  • SharePoint Online
• Question on long elapsed-time between releases: Basically, SteveB reply is that it has taken them this long (to the 2010 release) to get to the point where the foundation is at a point where they can release application-level functionality faster. But no insight as to what people should expect in the future - is the next release 2013? No guidance so I'm not sure anyone should believe that cycle times are going to get any better until there is proof...
• Question on social computing: SteveB rightly points out the need for social computing to address security and identity aspects of related applications and that IT organizations play a key role to help mitigate risks but no specific insight as to how data loss, identity and security issues are handling in 2010 social computing. Hopefully more to come in this space...

Notes from Jeff Teper keynote

• SharePoint 2010: the business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web
• Sites: single infrastructure for intranets, extranets and Internet sites
• "Replumbing" of UI, adding ribbon, etc
• SharePoint and Groove user experience consistent now - SharePoint Workspace, offline support, better mobile support
• Collaboration: wiki, blog, tags, etc etc all improved
• Social tagging was a significant focus area
• MySite - some rewriting of history on how MySite was positioned originally. Back circa 2003, MySite was an orphan feature that no one seemed at Microsoft was able to clearly position. Was never intended to play the role it is being positioned for today re: social computing.
• Profiles - revamping search and finding people
• Single metadata store for tags, taxonomy etc
• Search - query on experience, people search, KM aspects, social graph, org chart, etc
• Social Computing Demo
  • Activity feed, tags, tag clouds, recent blog posts, etc
  • Can see aggregation of other connections re: activities, etc
  • Ratings fro documents
  • Expertise location: people search ... displays people and profile information, can view recent content from person, authored content, browser where person is in organizational chart
  • Note board (like FB wall) on profile page

Comments

[Tristan]

Good summary. Any news about security? e.g. claims based authentication?

[Fred]

so what's your thoughts on SharePoint 2012 vs. Connections 2.5?

[Fred]

that of course should have been SharePoint "2010"

[@webworldtech]

Nice overview of the keynotes! FYI I have video I took of Ballmer at the closing end of his speech, where he talked about social media and SharePoint:

http://blog.webworldtechnologies.com/?p=16

Hope to run in to you!

[Sharepoint Conference]

thanks for the info. there will be Sharepoint conference in Denver this coming Sept. 23, 2010 where you’ll be able to attend workshops and technical classes – taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers and Microsoft MVPs.