SharePoint Conference Seattle, Day 1

KeyNote 1 – Bill Gates

Today was the first real day of sessions at the SharePoint Conference. It started of with two keynotes, first one was Bill Gates who had the amusing movie about his last day at Microsoft. After that he announced the Microsoft Online Services which you probably have already heard of. You can try the beta too. After that all it was some vision on the future. The 2008 wave is coming and what that will bring. I expected a little more vision.

There was a Q&A after the keynote and it was really nice to see that Bill Gates could actually answer technical questions. Didn’t expect him to know that much detail about SharePoint.

KeyNote 2 – Kurt DelBene

The second keynote showed some implementation examples of SharePoint, including nice SilverLight integration which had people talking about it in the lunch after it. There was discussion if the flash UI is actually what users want and what should be customizable or not. It’s good to see some new interfaces and new ideas tried. We also saw some implementation of the 2008 wave and the failover that SQL 2008 is capable of. The demo was exiting, they ripped a blade out of a HP blade server and smacked it on the table.

We also saw some nice tools to try. The Solution Accelerator, SharePoint Asset Inventory, Capacity planner and Extranet Collaboration Toolkit. I also learned that VS2008 is much better for SharePoint development.

ECMS313 – Strong Security for SharePoint: Active Directory Right Management Services (AD RMS)

This session was about RMS and SharePoint. The session was quite technical and it had a lot of questions but was interesting. I always assumed (shame on me) that IRM and RMS of Microsoft would be proprietary. Although it’s not an full open platform, other ISV’s are able to write software extensions to get the same integration as Office does.

There was also some confusion about Permissions and RMS. I see RMS as content permissions and not file authorization.

ECMS310 – Content Query Web Part

This session was about the Content Query Web Part which is very capable of showing/styling content of SharePoint sites or other sources. The styling is done with XSLT and can be centrally manager. The session took quite long and had lots of tips in it, which came at the end after hearing what the CQWP could do for tree times. So could session on the Tips and Tricks, just a bit too long.

AG304 – Enforce Governance by Provisioning sites with Workflow

This session showed 3 ways of automating site provision aside from the standard methods that are available. One showed SharePoint designer used, which is very nice. The session was presented by Ed Hild, he mention that lots of stuff can be found on his blog.

Conclusion

A nice first day. Always hard to pick the correct sessions, for now. It’s downtown for a meeting with the K2 Underground guys :)

[UPDATE]Added some links in the text + Photo :)

SharePoint Conference Seattle, Day 0

A small update from Seattle. Today was a very nice day with weather. We went to the space needle and went to the Olympic Statue Park. We also did some shopping and enjoyed the sun even more :)

We went shopping with the group and at 18.00hours we checked into the SharePoint conference. There were a lot of people already there. They had check-in lines based on first letter of surname. The a-c queue went very fast. The others weren’t so fast. Nevertheless we went along to the conference, did a quick round. Grabbed some food from the buffed and took a drink. After that we had a great dinner with some Microsoft employees from the Netherlands. I believe the Chris Ruth Steak was the best i ever had!

SharePoint Conference, the trip and day -1

Day -1? Yes, day -1. We’re already here on Saturday. On Sunday you can check in for the conference so that’s day 0 :)

Flight

The flight left 13:45 local time which was 40 minutes later due to “heavy winds”. Flight took the normal 10hours and we landed at about 15:00hours local time. There’s a 9 hour difference between Amsterdam and Seattle.

Once here, everybody was tired from the trip, and customs was a long wait. Went to the hotel, did some freshing up and went out for some food. We had a nice restaurant at Pike’s Place Market.

Picture of the view in the hotel

What’s up next?

Tomorrow we have a free day up until the evening for the check-in of the conference.