First Conference Day at SPC 2009

The conference launced with keynotes of Steve Ballmer and Jeff Teber. In his enthiousastic presentation Steve showed us some of the larger new or improved capabilities, and what can be achieved with them in nowadays business collaboration applications. Amongst them extended functionality to set up and use SharePoint sites, including all kinds of social interactions (blogs, wiki's, RSS); communities, search which in the high-end SharePoint Server 2010 Search now incorporates the FAST Search algorithmes and functionality, improved people (thus social) search; business intelligence; composite (mash-up) applications; improvements in both the developers as the IT pros experiences. For developers: Microsoft has made another major step on ALM aspects!! Both Steve's as Jeff's talks were validated via a multitude of fun demo's. Jeff came on stage, and took us back to the ancient times of SharePoint birth. It was both fun as reassuring to see that the original vision for SharePoint still holds, also within the forthcoming 2010 edition. Of course a lot of the support and functionality is improved since Tahoe; but the initiating ideas and vision still applies. This is reassuring because it proves that SharePoint is a well-thought service offering from and for Microsoft. One of the most signaficant statements Steve made is that he sees SharePoint actually has an platform. I totally agree on that idea.

After these 2 keynotes the BreakOut Sessions started. Often a pitty to have to make a selection for only one of the parallel breakouts. Luckily Microsoft has promised to on short notice stream the video recording of every individual session via MySPC. It's too much here to repeat what I've heard and learned in the 3 afternoon sessions. However, to me one of the most visuable changes is the way SharePoint looks and behaves. The SharePoint UI look is cleaned up, and again complies with current (web 2.0/3.0) standards. And in the behavioural aspect the most significants aspects are the ribbon and context-aware UI-controls, and the improved User eXperience by applying Ajax technology to make SharePoint operation more (user) performant.