SharePoint Conference 2009
SharePoint Conference 2009 kicked off this week with a keynote address from Jeff Teper (CVP, Office Business Platform) and Steve Ballmer (you know who he is). I thought I'd highlight some of the main themes touched on during the presentation and try to drill in to detail in some other posts as I dig in more.
- Developer Experience Improvements
- Install on Vista or Windows 7 (huge - no more need to do dev on VPC)
- Visual Studio 2010 tooling enhancements (F5 experience, designers for packaging)
- Developer dashboard - can enable page trace info with more detail
- SharePoint Designer improvements (they say it's even for devs who are used to Visual Studio...hmm...)
- SharePoint Online
- Hosting SharePoint in the cloud instead of onsite
- This could be for intranet or extranet solutions
- Business Connectivity Services
- New two-way access to outside business data that was previously read-only
- Enhancements to Search
- FAST search (FAST was acquired by MS)
- Improved search options and display, including preview support of Office docs
- Improved User Interface/Interaction
- UI is ajax-enabled and the Ribbon is now used for context-sensitive actions (Check-out, insert web part, etc.)
- Better support for xhtml standards and multiple browsers
- Remote/Offline access through SharePoint Workspace (next generation of Groove)
- Lists and Document Library Improvements
- Support for tens of millions of docs or items
- "Taxonomy management" - controlling the metadata values at the enterprise level
- Improved UI for slicing the data
- Easier Administration
- PowerShell is now what is used for everything (over 500 commands, "what if" command to preview what would happened, Remote managment from Windows 7)
- Usage logging to database that will have a published schema to allow custom reports
- MS has been "dog fooding" by doing the SharePoint Online hosting (i.e. they want it to be easy, too)
- Social Computing
- Social tagging and additional ways to follow and find people (Facebook-like features in the workplace)
- Encouraging more use of my sites
- Multiple SKUs now depending on intranet/extranet/internet/search
I was a little surprised that workflow wasn't really discussed much since that is something I've looked at a lot. There was a lot of focus on the SharePoint Online offering which is probably because of the complexity of managing a SharePoint infrastructure.
The talk definitely highlighted that SharePoint is a platform. As I've been talking to people attending the conference, that is apparent. SharePoint 2010 (and 2007) is a beast and everyone is trying to understand how to best use it for their needs.