Microsoft SharePoint 2009 Conference was a Success!
Microsoft’s biggest SharePoint show of the year in Las Vegas was a pretty big success. They were sold out (7400 attendees) completely, and the Microsoft fanboys were out in force. Luckily, Microsoft was there feeding them some good information on SharePoint with a plethora of classes, sessions, and discussions.
We had a booth out there showing off our SharePoint integration with our SFT and fax products. Some good interest. Didn’t notice any other MFT/SFT vendor there however. We got quite a few SharePoint system integrators and developers who were interested in our Web services APIs to add secure file transfer and inbound/outbound fax to their solutions.
I attended several of the sessions while I was out there. One of the most lively was an analyst panel which was probably the most intense and argumentative events I’ve seen. Most analysts either seem to agree for the most part, or politely disagree. At this session, phrases like “you’re wrong” were flying back and forth. That was fun.
Otherwise, the big news is SharePoint 2010 and various announcements surrounding the next release. The analysts suggested waiting for the first service pack before moving it into production, which is of course the wise, conservative approach.
SharePoint 2010 sounds like a pretty big step up from 2007. A lot more functionality, flexibility, search power (adding FAST searching), and focus on personalization, a la FaceBook, and community. One of the cooler demos shown was the ability to directly pull data from SQL databases and show that data in a list. Users can also make CRUD changes from within SharePoint and have it automatically update the back end database.
Of course, Steve Ballmer was there at the keynote. I was hoping to see some crazy dancing, or at least some hopping around, but no, he was pretty calm. Of course, he’s so loud he really didn’t need a microphone to reach the entire auditorium.
