Welcome to Day One of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011.
It’s already been a fantastic conference. I arrived here yesterday morning. I got to spend a little time with family here in LA during the day yesterday – I was lucky enough to get a ride on my brother’s neighbor’s personally owned fire truck on my way down here. (A long story.) Hey, I got to SPC11 (in part) on a firetruck!
This is an interesting event – there’s no new release of SharePoint, so we expect a deep review of how SharePoint usage and enhancements. Also, a lot of tablets here – iPads, and a few lucky Slate Windows 8 tablets.
I already posted a summary of this morning’s keynote address, led by Jared Spataro with Jeff Teper and Kurt Delbene. Here are some highlights:
- Expect a public preview of the next version of SharePoint at the SharePoint Conference 2012, November 12-15, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada.
- 125 million SharePoint Users worldwide currently.
- The next version of SharePoint has the largest development history in SharePoint history to support v15 (the next release) and a new prelease of Office 365. Expect a lot in user interface enhancements and branding.
- Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) program for SharePoint
- Office 265 will support full two way Business Connectivity Services (BCS) connections to web-service based data by year end
- New Microsoft Visio server architectures visualization tools to be available this week for download from Microsoft.com
- New scaling and architecture whitepapers were used to support 14TB content databases with full failover of a live 15 server farm under load running on SQL Denali CTP
Session Highlights
Here are highlights from a few sessions I visited:
SharePoint for Knowledge Communities
The best take away from this is to organize your intranet around functional “communities” rather than traditional department sub sites. Jim Kane from Paragon Consulting highlighted the following:
- Knowledge communities have to breakdown challenges of wikis and folders – they are repositories, not communities
- Knowledge hoarding – people pull in far more information than they push back
- Tacit information = information that is needed but not actively sought
- Tacit information is the core problem – how do you get information into the right hands without someone having to search for it.
- Organize your taxonomy around content repositories by project, practice, or topic centric
- Don't create department sites and throw a template at it - create a community
- Don't make it an -IT project
- Use a community to introduce mysites
Always On in SQL 2011 “Denali”
Bill Baer from Microsoft did a fantastic job showing how simply live failover is configured in SQL 2011 "Denali” The best part isn’t just “disaster” failover, but graceful failover to smoothly transition between servers from planned maintenance, etc. “Always On” mode is setup via easy wizard.
But wait, there-s more – on October 6, Microsoft will release a new PowerShell command line builder – the PowerShell Design Surface. It looks like Windows 8/Metro, and will be available from the Windows PowerShell Resource Center soon.
Developing and Extending Enterprise Content Management Features
Paul Swider led this session – and it was great to see such a big crowd for a great friend to the SharePoint community.
Paul led through a series of practical tips and demos:
- You can easily customize a site and save the template to the SharePoint solution Gallery – then the template can be exported as a WSP and imported into Visual Studio 2010 for further enhancement
- The DocumentID function provides a static URL that can always reference a document by ID regardless of its physical position. It is coded by referencing the Office.DocumentManagement library in the ISAPI folder of the SharePoint root/14 Hive. It uses the server object model. Paul showed a great implementation trick – implement GetDocumentURLs by ID to return the documents URL reference.
- In addition, the end user web part that allows user to type in a document ID directly for retrieval can itself be overridden.
Other Stuff
A final note – I saw in the tweet stream that the Productivity Hub – a series of free end user training tools for SharePoint that can be added directly to your farm – is available for download now, and will be available for SharePoint 2010 SP1 in November from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7122
Thanks!