For starters the name has changed to drop the “Office” element from the brand, this does not mean less integration and in actual fact the integration has been enhanced to allow for surfacing data into the clients such as Outlook and Word with productivity enhancement tools and configuration. To crown it this data can be made Read / Write.

Secondly the strap line has changed to “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and Web“. The wheel has changed somewhat however not too much and still provides the high level overview of grouped functionality.

The value propositions are as follows:

 Connect and Empower People

 Cut Cost with Unified Infrastructure

 Rapidly Respond to Business Needs

This simplified message very much aligns with the three stakeholders that you will most likely encounter namely Users, IT and the Business. All the messages and enhancements can easily be grouped under these three main headings.

The enhancements that I believe will open new opportunities for SharePoint are the following:

Multi-tenancy – That recurring revenue stream that have been eluding you forever and a day might very well no be possible as it allow tenants to happily live together in perfect harmony on a single implementation. The only caveat is that you should be able to speak PowerShell, a small sacrifice really.

Scalable Architecture – much more granular than before and allowing for a configuration that can be as standard as you want or as complex as your environment requires. Service Applications (preciously shared service providers) are now broken down into true service that can be scaled out depending on you needs and even load balanced via a built in feature or additional load balancing provisions should it be required.

Tagging – Aka Metadata, Folksonomies, Taxonomies. Whatever name you choose for this, it certainly makes the content relevant and up to date by allowing real users to associate the context they want to their data. I can see this taking off a big way. Managing structure taxonomy, something I have had many a request for in the past, is now done and can be shared across farms. Pretty decent to be honest.

Standards Based – In broad terms much of what is been developed have followed some sort of standard where applicable. The most notable instance of this is the web interface that is WCAG 2.0 compliant, someone did slip that it is AA however I have seen no written evidence to this effect.

When 7500 people come together to Share their enthusiasm for a software product that is not so much for recreation, you start thinking resistance is futile…

It basically comes down to what analysts have been saying for a long time. Any enterprise has an IT services element that can broadly be divided into two types of offerings. These are Differentiating Services and Non-Differentiating services.

With the new “cloud” looming large it seems that no one will commit to fully move all there services into it as yet but that it would be a good place to move all non-differentiating services freeing up resources to create the stuff that makes you (your enterprise) unique and gives you the edge over the competitor.

Good candidates would not to be moved would be your eCom Site that outperforms any high street store. Chances are you would not want to surrender this to the cloud as yet. However stuff like document management, mail etc might be good services to release into the cloud allowing to focus more resource onto the areas that will allow for innovation.

If anyone follows what Gartner and Forrester have to say these days you would probably be wise to the fact that Mobile is the next desktop and that Television is an expected area for growth, most likely as we all know how to use it but in terms of getting useful data from it its pretty useless.

Following sound principles like standards, WCAG and more, makes life easier in terms of cross platform support, however Steve made it clear that all will not always be well related to operating systems that resemble fruit (Apple) and related browsers for obvious reasons.

Moving forward the design seems to focus on releasing data from the vaults (databases) that currently lock them up and to make it easier to govern implementations. “Dog food” and all that dictates that when you run an environment the scale of the cloud you would most likely want to know what you are doing, when it comes to operations. These lessons and tools are making its way into the product, however as rightly pointed out governance is 80% Process and 20% Technology

Development tools have also been enhanced to now actually “speak” SharePoint and the ability to run an implementation on Windows Vista and 7 makes it much easier to be productive. (This will not be done on my watch for the obvious reasons). Everything is moving towards PowerShell however it is not all there yet. Expect more to come I guess and yes STSAdm will still be working.

In summary all is pretty much as expected and as things are getting better in terms of scalability and governance. I can’t say that it was a big surprise except for SQL Server Power Pivot. Allowing you to work with masses of data in excel (desktop) and server-side at warp speed. Pretty impressive to say the least, part of brining BI to the masses

Been really hard for me to drag myself to
Vegas for a week of sunshine and getting to see the new line up Microsoft has
installed for us in its new release of SharePoint 2010.

]]> http://www.peterverster.com/sharepoint-2010-the-long-and-short-of-it/feed/ 0 http://www.peterverster.com/trying-to-get-breakfast-at-sharepoint-conference-2009/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trying-to-get-breakfast-at-sharepoint-conference-2009 http://www.peterverster.com/trying-to-get-breakfast-at-sharepoint-conference-2009/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:26:00 +0000 Peter /post/SharePoint-Conference-2009-Breakfast.aspx Do not go for breakfast at 8 AM, you'll get swamped