Sharepoint Conference 2009

I’m back from the Sharepoint Conference 2009 from a couple of weeks (it has been held on 19-22 October in Las Vegas) and I’m in a huge late in publishing some personal annotation from there.

The keynote was driven by Tom Rizzo and Steve Ballmer

The key messages were:

• Beta will be available November, the goal is to made the RTM available for the 2Q 2010;
• One thing is Sharepoint 2010 on premises, on thing is Sharepoint Online (business opportunities and different target for them);
• Sharepoint Services is going to change is name to Sharepoint Foundation and it will not be longer part of Windows Server (it will be an independent downloadable package);
• Total integration between Development Environment (VS2010), BDC (now Business Connectivity Services) and Office 2010;
• Sharepoint now run on Windows 7/Vista to leverage the integration with VS2010 (this is real happiness for me and many of my customers);

• Full Ajax support to reduce the front-end flickering;
• Full WEB 2.0 , social and and community features (document rating), the idea is to “recreate” the Facebook experience in Sharepoint for business purpose;
• The User Interface is totally based on Ribbons (like Office 2007);
• Full Streaming support for video, audio and pics (I guess that someone will run his own clone of youporn on SP2010!). This is to better support SilverLight development;
• I love BI and I was impressed by PowerPivot (it’s an in-memory database)
• I’ve seen filtering from Excel 2010 100 milions rows in less than 1 second! Simply incredible!!
• Performance Point now is part of Sharepoint (this is a huge news from a strategic perspective because in this way it should be easier to push it to the SMI market, where Perfomance Point alone wasn’t a justified as an investment);
• Groove is now fully integrated with Sharepoint providing offline support (but offline and syncing is also possible with Office 2010)
• Access, Visio, Word services and services architecture (yes Access, Visio and Word now work on server side)
• Full REST architecture to access the Sharepoint data (very exciting for me’cause I’m a REST fan)
• Huge improvement on Document Libraries performance. Now each folder could host one milion items.
• Workflow, seems to work on .Net 3.5, I don’t see big news maybe the management from Sharepoint Designer where the workflow now are reusable and can be export/imported with VS2010;
• Shared Services have been reengineered and now they are called Application Services and are sharable between more server farms;
• Sand-Boxed Application, developers can leverage a developer mode to sand-box the application guaranteeing the reliability of the farm. Very interesting but the development model still seems tricky and challenging.

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