SharePoint Conference Day One

I'm at the SharePoint 2009 conference in Vegas this week. Here are some notes from today – no conclusions, just some notes…I'll try to post something later in the week and I'll continue to tweet all week - @chapmaa

The Keynote

You've no idea how many bad keynotes that I've sat through in my life but today's was not one of them. The keynotes ran for 2:45 without a break but the presenters did such a good job that it did not feel long at all. So how did they do that? They had some passionate people on the stage, (most notable was Tom Rizzo), and they told the message in a way that the audience wanted to hear it not in the way that marketing wanted to present it. Within the first 30 minutes Rizzo was writing code in a live demo! They didn't just say what 2010 will do they showed what it will do and how. Without exception the team did an exceptional job.

As a side note, Jeff Teper called SharePoint "the ultimate Swiss army knife"…I think that’s a good description.

The recurring themes…

• Reduce costs…not sure how many times Ballmer mentioned reducing costs but it was a core message. Have fewer systems, fewer vendors, be more nimble. "Get more done with less" was the overriding message here.
• The cloud…they kept mentioning the cloud but they didn't give to much detail. This was perhaps the one area where it was higher-level than I'd have liked to have seen. Microsoft online was mentioned, the new web-based office tools were used heavily but no specifics about the actual cloud structure per se.
• Support for inter- and intranet support as well as support for the office online tools. These are two very different things but they got a little merged in the keynote.
• Streamlined deployment and debugging…a bit techie for me this but I could see the value of being able to easily deploy solutions.

Post keynote I attended intro sessions and ECM sessions…

The Content Management Messages

I'd say that in general ECM is being played down as just part of a much bigger play. For example, Ryan Duguid pointed out that you can tag, annotate and place legal holds on anything in SharePoint, not just documents. I was watching out for ECM comments for obvious reasons, here are some highlights:

• Overall ECM 2010 Changes
  • Scale ECM up and out - a general message and pretty vague
  • Taxonomy, workflow and document sets have been added
  • DAM (later qualified by Ryan as being not being full blown DAM but being media management for images and video including intelligent streaming direct from SharePoint)
  • More flexible governance (policy and RM support)
    • Declare as record - I need to talk to Ryan about this one because it looked like it just 'made the object immutable'  not actually declared it as a record
    • Manage records in place
    • Route to records center and leave a stub behind
      • I loath and detest this as an approach but Ryan addressed this by saying that Microsoft were giving customers a choice - IMHO this means that they can do it properly or they can stub ;-)
  • Increase in number of objects that can be managed by SharePoint
  • Master metadata management (see below - this one deserves its own section)
  • Document Set support…create a relationship between documents and manage them as a single document.
  • Offline support - (see below - this gets its own notes too)
  • Extension of routing table usage
    • Can be used anywhere on any content type and across sites
    • Can create a 'content organizer' as a drop zone
      • Users import content in to the content organizer and the rules will move the content in to the correct location. This seems to include rules that will look at the contents of the object, (Ryan showed moving anything with a social security number to a specific location).

Metadata Driven Navigation

SharePoint 2010 has a lot of focus on metadata taxonomy management. This still looks like it is not entirely fully baked yet but the basics are there and it is flexible. It looks like it scales across SharePoint sites/farms but also allows external systems to access the taxonomy. This is a good strategy for a few reasons:

• Strategically, if you own a company's metadata you become the information hub for all the information-centric systems
• If you can get users to tag content correctly at a logical time then you can remove the workload from them later and use rules to apply complex operations on the content further on in the information lifecycle.
• Most importantly navigating content based on metadata is much more natural, (you search and then activate filters to remove noise - think about how eBay let's you filter in real time).
• If the only thing that SharePoint 2010 brought was this faceted navigation then it would be worth the effort to upgrade for that alone – IMHO.

Offline Support

Microsoft talked about "SharePoint Workspace" a lot. This allows you to synchronize content from SharePoint to your desktop to:

1. Work offline
2. Use this as a way of working in low-bandwidth locations

The second use case above is a very interesting usable model and in some ways addresses one of SharePoint's enterprise limitations.

I’ll make an effort to learn more about this because it is potentially very interesting as a Microsoft partner.

Managing content on the file system

This is another one where I need to do some extra research but in a nutshell the file system has the capability to store metadata natively and then content can be pushed up in to a specific SharePoint site based on rules. As the content hits the SharePoint site the rules in a content organizer can further file away the content. It can leave stubs behind BTW, I’ll reserve my comments until I see how good the native file system is at masking these as being virtualized.

Here are my raw notes from Ryan’s talk – as I say, I’ll be working through this one a bit this week.

• File server resource manager. Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Apply metadata properties to content on the file server
  • Can have rules running on the file server
  • Can look inside content for patterns too.
  • Can auto upload content from the file server to SharePoint automatically.
  • They leave links behind that point to the SharePoint location.
    • On ingestion content is further redirected to a SharePoint folder location

 

I’d say that day was was very good – 7,400 attendees, almost perfect organization and a great vibe.

Comments

[Sanjeev Samala]

Thanks for sharing the event happenings