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 :)