Microsoft Sharepoint Conference review, Las Vegas 2009

Day One commenced with Ballmer who opened his first SharePoint Conference and sets the scene for great things to come.

Due to the sheer size of the conference it had to be moved to Las Vegas and a suitable location to the growing demand for attendance. With 7,430 paying attendees (up from 3,600 in 2008) from 70 countries and supported by 165 sponsors the Mandalay Bay Hotel was a good choice. With more calmness than his reputation Ballmer acknowledged that SharePoint was a technology he wanted to exceed the expectations of its original ‘portal’ target and he supported the growing investment Microsoft are making to create a product that is truly delivering to modern ways of working – integrated systems, high sociable computing, extensible and standards building (and adopting).

A great new phrase was coined at the conference: ‘automagical computing’. The principle is that through the technology we can create some wonderful findings, outcomes and connections within our businesses that we otherwise do not unlock and exploit. The extensive changes to SharePoint – now named simply ‘Microsoft SharePoint 2010’ – will dramatically improve the capacity for businesses to do more with less people, technology and money. Labeling SharePoint 2010 as ‘the business collaboration solution’ is actually stealing my thunder; six months ago the SharePoint specialists at Calsoft agreed to develop the ‘Calsoft Business Collaboration Suite’; was Ballmer on my Facebook?

This is a technology conference so plenty of great new features functions and gimmicks were presented throughout to great applause and much whopping from the audience (I presume mainly the Americans). On a more practical note – this is a great leap forward! I was very impressed by the quantum shift for SharePoint 2007, regarded as a collection of bits held together as a single product, to a highly integrated, business capable technological suite. Much of the emphasis is to try to embrace the ‘thinking to innovation’ models of today’s successful enterprises. Tom Rizzo followed Ballmer to walkthrough this more balanced product with four key messages:
1: Create social business communities,
2: Overcome scale and content limitations,
3: Simplify and address governance and finally
4: Create and evolve Insight.

These are the 2010 principles for Partners to take from the new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 release.

So what’s in it for Calsoft? SharePoint is here to stay and with its tighter integration capability with Exchange, Office and back-end systems is fast becoming a ‘must have’ technology in all sizes of enterprise; this is a highly exploitable market opportunity. We must adopt these tools ourselves and build expertise and competence so we can be part of the great wave of change. If we do not we will lose out on a massive opportunity.

Day 1 continued with some great breakouts. I attended the ‘ECM for the masses’ – and excellent presentation on how document stores are becoming ‘collaboration stores which so happen to include documents, people, news, comment and much more. Finally ‘leveraging MOSS and Office Applications’ gave a great insight into the ‘single technology architecture’ drive from Microsoft – and this makes a lot of sense for many of our clients and prospects.

Dave Gardiner