Day 2 started with a session on xRM and SharePoint.  It was somewhat ironic that this session was very similar, in terms of content, to the session we do at live events and in our webinars at Success Accelerators.  There were a few custom tools that I had not seen before, but overall this was a good session for anyone looking to determine if they can leverage CRM with SharePoint.  We work closely with Customer Connect in this area, and have done quite a few integration and xRM implementations, so this is all exciting stuff, and goes back to our motto of ‘SharePoint as a platform.’

Here are a few more highlights from Day 2:

• SharePoint Server 2010 is now better equipped to handle multi-tenancy
• Service Applications (formerly SSP) can now be grouped and multiple (many) can co-exist
• MOSS 2007 farms cannot interoperate with MSS 2010 farms
• SharePoint now has a fairly robust client object model (REST, JavaScript, Silverlight, .NET)
  • This is HUGE and opens the door for so many possibilities
• Office 2007 and 2010 documents can use this client object model to interact with SharePoint
• Upgrade has been completely retooled and a lot of emphasis was put on this functionality
  • Must be on SP2+ for WSS v3 or MOSS 2007
  • October 2009 Cumulative Update (CU) provides additional updates to upgrade functionality
  • Run pre-upgrade checker often in production to check your farm for inconsistencies
  • After upgrade, you can keep the existing 2007 UI ‘look and feel’ 
  • Upgrade is intelligent and searches for features and customizations in Hive 14 then 12 then 6
  • Upgrade will not fail on first error; MUCH easier upgrade re-tries

 I will give credit to Microsoft, they received feedback from partners and customers on the upgrade process and took it to heart and actually implemented many of the changes that were so desperately needed. Great job on this Microsoft.