SharePoint Conference 2009We are at the Worldwide SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas this week, and all I can really say at this point is “WOW!”  The talented team at StreamLogic works with our clients on SharePoint implementations every day, so we definitely understand its popularity and what a great tool it is.  But walking into the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, I was overwhelmed and surprised; my thought…SharePoint is HUGE!

Day 1 started with keynote speeches from Steve Ballmer, Jeff Teper and Tom Rizzo.  Honestly, I would call this a pep-rally rather than a keynote address, as it had more of a ‘rock concert’ feel than a technology conference.  Overall, I sensed an emphasis on the concept of SharePoint as a ‘platform’, which is a concept we have been promoting for quite some time to our clients and via our live and web events.  This really hit-home when I attended the first ‘developer’ session of the day and there were over 3,000 (I assume developers) attending this one session!  In fact, one of the first demos that Tom Rizzo showed in the keynote was a more technical demo using the BCS (Business Connectivity Services – currently BDC in MOSS 2007) and web part development.

We were also very fortunate to be invited to spend a few hours in the booth with our partner, Bamboo Solutions.  We were the only firm from North Carolina to be invited to share the booth with Bamboo, so I want to personally say ‘thank-you’ to the Bamboo team.

Here are a few more highlights from Day 1:

  • Over 7,400 in attendance
  • 94% growth in attendance from the previous conference
  • 240 sessions over 4 days
  • 300+ hours of new, SharePoint 2010 content
  • 45+ hours of hands-on labs with the new tools
  • SharePoint Online now has over 1,000,000 users and 7,000 partners
  • You can mix-and-match on-premise with SharePoint Online (‘in the cloud’)
  • Visual Studio 2010 integrates A LOT of new SharePoint functionality for rapid development
  • SharePoint 2010 Beta will be released in November
  • New product names:
  • New Silverlight controls
  • Document sets (documents can now be grouped as a ‘package’ or ‘set’)
  • Development can be done on Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP1
  • Sandbox Solutions – a new way to package and deploy ‘test code’ with full isolation