Wow, that was a little bit overwhelming, almost 3 hours of overviews, demos, and vision sharing can be a little bit daunting coming in one big gulp without any breaks. Here's a summary of the things that caught my eye during the keynote. First up Tom Rizzo got up and told us a bit about how successful this conference is, they've doubled the attendance from the last one from around 3500 to over 7400 this week. There's a world wide audience attending, almost all countries are represented. They set up facilities on the web site to search for attendees at the conference and also to associate your membership in Sharepoint User Groups. They have over 300 hours of content, 45 hours worth of hands on labs available all during the week. They are also making the slide decks and videos of each of the presentations available 24-48 hours after the presentations. We're going to give feedback about the sessions we attend, and then on the ones that we don't get to attend we'll watch them and let everyone know what we think of them, and if they are worthwhile to watch. Steve Ballmer got up, and fortunately he didn't do any dancing, screaming or speaking in tongues. He talked a bit about how Sharepoint is his number one favorite product. He explained a bit that his vision (ie Microsofts vision) is to make information a seamless experience from the PC, to the phone and other mobile devices, and on the TV using a natural interface, and leveraging cloud computing. The 'goal' of Sharepoint is to provide for the sharing, gaining insight, and the collaboration of information in the enterprise. He also announced that the Public Beta of Sharepoint 2010, Office 2010, and Workspaces 2010 (formerly Groove) will be released in early November. Bummer, no beta bits this week, huge disappointment. Jeff Teper stated that the reason behind the delay was that they've pushed it out to a larger group at Microsoft and wanted to capture some performance metrics and do any necessary tweaks necessary before releasing the beta. This might mean there will only be one beta before the final release. He also said that at this point it's 'Feature Complete' and that they are currently working on bug fixes and performance tuning. Workspaces 2010 replaces Groove as the offline client for SharePoint. It allows you to 'take your work' with you, work with it offline, then sync it back up when you re-connect. The expected time frame for release of SharePoint 2010 is the first half of the year. There is much better support for browsers and mobile devices. There was three main changes in SharePoint 2010. VS 2010 beta 2 is available now on MSDN, WOOOOOOOT. I hope they have got the performance up, and based on the demos we've seen so far they have. Features: Other new things in SharePoint: One question that came up was if Visual Studio 2010 can be used with MOSS, and the answer was no. VS 2010 uses a lot of the enhancements in SharePoint 2010 to provide its own enhancements. Jim Teper the VP of SharePoint came up and shared some of the highlights of the new version: Sites –
Communities –
- Wiki's, and Blogs have been enhance (and from what I've seen I like what they've done)
- Tags, ratings, and bookmarks have been added to document libraries and lists.
- MySites smart profiles and feeds
- Browse your colleagues, experts and organizational information including a brand new Silverlight org chart which looks very nice.
Content Management –
- Improved to handle larger lists and libraries, 1 million items in lists and 10 million in document libraries.
- New taxonomy management to help manage the data in these new large lists, and enhanced meta data.
- Digital asset management for Photos and Videos, including support out of the box for streaming of video.
Search –
- Standard search from MOSS and FAST search from a company they acquired
- They wanted to enhance the experience, relevance and navigation of search
- Improved people search
- Search is much more scalable and flexible and multiple indexes are allowed, and aggregate searches across the various indexes
Insights and BI –
- Excel services has been enhanced, along with better SQL Server support
- PerformancePoint services – provide dashboards and KPI's
- Visio services, and charting webpart
- BCS enhanced
Powerpivot is new functionality that allows you to work with extremely large amounts of data, like 100 million rows.
Other enhancements
- Fewer refreshes when editing items
- Multiple checkouts for documents
- Document sets – allows you to create a predefined set of documents
- View lists and libraries by metadata
- Tag clouds implemented in blogs
- Ratings by users in the document libraries
- Excel services data is easier to access, the interface is browser based
- Better dashboards
IT Professionals and Administrators
- Support for SharePoint on Premises and in the Cloud (SharePoint Online)
- New web administration interface, and powershell scripts, over 500 cmdlets ship with SharePoint 2010
- Throttling, monitoring, and analytics – along with custom reports for usage analysis including access to the schemas for logs in SQL
- Improved upgrade process and availability during the upgrade – New model for upgrading, you can upgrade servers using the existing UI, customized or not. Then you can preview what the UI would look like if it's upgraded.
- Easier to deploy cumulative updates, and reporting on what updates have been applied
Sorry if it's kind of sporadic and varied, but there was quite a bit of information I tried to capture. The sessions start soon, so I'll be posting about those as I go to them.