Final Day at the SharePoint Conference

Final day and many individuals arrive with fatigue for a very technical day of sessions and education. The key for me today is the focus on Search and Apply technology which is primarily been the domain of third party product providers as SharePoint has lacked greatly in this area. The tools are very varied from the simple ‘replicate and secure’ to Knowledge-Based surfacing of critical information.

A great aspect of the new 2010 product is the Document Stores. In the past SharePoint has had document stores but the library is a more intimate and detailed presentation showing the library summary, who owns the library, how many documents posted, the categories for documents and the search criteria available. A key aspect of improved search is the ‘tagging’ and simplified metadata areas of SharePoint – this has been a poor feature of 2007 which is now an enterprise strength function available out-of-the-box.

I attended a special event (by invitation) with Colligo – desktop tooling for SharePoint Portals. This is another poor functional area which they addressed with their own tool kit. The lunch included three guest speakers: two from companies that have implemented and one partner (Quest Software). Although a little contrived on how the tool has delivered but the screen grabs and examples left me feeling this is still too basic.

My Summary: overall the showcase had many good ‘add-on-supplier’ products but I did not see any business solutions being offered. This is an opportunity for Calsoft. Las Vegas as a venue is a crazy but interesting place. The venue served everyone well and the food and entertainment has been first class. That’s it for another year.

David Gardiner