At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas: Lots of great information and networking yesterday and today – starting Day 2 with Social Computing with Microsoft. But, before we get into that, a few things I came away with yesterday – specifically things that we should all dig deeper into in the coming days - between conversations, keynotes and sessions:
- The public beta for SharePoint 2010 isn’t going to be available for at least a few weeks – sometime in November. 🙁
- RTM for SharePoint 2010 is targeted at the 1st half of 2010
- SharePoint Designer 2010 will continue to be free – even though its going to have a LOT more functionality.
- The cloud concept is going to be a large and growing component of the SharePoint picture – understanding what is available and when to consider using it for part or all of your solutions will be key.
- A new Media Player web part is available – its all the rage. 🙂
- One of the questions asked of Steve Ballmer was about having a *single* page to come to for information about patching and versioning. The stock answer was that you go to TechNet for this, but he genuinely seemed interested in revisiting that… It would be nice to have a single page – 1 vote from me.
- MS is intending to have more information available from the governance perspective due directly to their work with the cloud and having to answer a lot of these questions themselves – determining best practices along the way. Looking forward to seeing this.
- Look for a lot more interaction and tooling between SharePoint and Access. No joke. Check it out.
- OWA. Yep, it means something else now – not replacing Outlook Web Access – but also meaning Office Web Apps
- Wikis are going to play a MUCH bigger part of 2010. There are both Standard and Enterprise wikis now.
- People Search now has phonetic helpers in case you don’t know how to spell someone’s name.
- Project Gemini is now PowerPivot.
- IT Pros: There are already over 500 PowerShell commandlets available for SharePoint 2010. Everyone told us it was coming. It’s here.
Remember: We’re still working from pre-Beta, so things are likely to change.