Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, Anaheim, CA

Keynote Quick Notes

Nerdy looking guys with both straps of their backpack on? Check. 80% of the room staring at their mobile device? Check. Well-dressed Euros taking pictures of everything? Check. We’ve got ourselves a tech conference!!!

Introduction

Jared Spataro - Sr. Director of SharePoint Product Management

• 7500 attendees

• Over 1 billion dollars in sales and growing in the double digits

• 125 million licenses sold (62 Million of SharePoint 2010 alone)

• 67% adoption among Microsoft enterprise customers

• Celebrity video: Luke Perry, Carmen Electra, Allan Thicke, Florence Henderson,

Speaker #1

Jeff Teper- Corporate Vice President, SharePoint Product Group

Theme is to get the most out of the conference and never hear yourself say “I didn’t know SharePoint can do that”

Redefine collaboration

• Empower users by rolling out a self-service user experience 
• Self-service business intelligence. Pull data from your whole infrastructure and use and manipulate it in SharePoint. 
• Create a social fabric using things like the Outlook social connector 
• Build relationships and break down silos 
• Extend collaboration outside the firewall and include partners and customers 
• Showed video on how Spacex has built a strong collaboration infrastructure. They’re excited about the cloud and mobile aspects of SharePoint.

Unleash the Ecosystem

• The developer community is growing exponentially 
• Will continue to push integration with Visual Studio 
• Want to further integrate with third party data. Not just read only, but manipulate and make better 
• Have numerous partners building solutions on the SharePoint platform. BCS to remote web services with Office 365 is coming. 
• There are new levels of SharePoint certifications coming to help identify those with the highest level of knowledge.

Build a world-class platform

• MS are growing their SharePoint engineering team 
• Merge silos like websites, blogs, wikis, document management systems, record management systems into SharePoint. 
• Creating an architecture that supports hundreds of millions of documents and properly manage them.

Demo

• Demoed a 15 server farm with 400 TB of storage. 1 contend database is 15 TB! 
• Has 7500 users connected and using a SharePoint environment 
• Navigates a document library with millions of documents with zero lag
•  Using FAST
• High availability with SQL Denali. Allows you to replicate all db’s to another SQL server (not just content databases). Failed a 14.4 TB content database over in 10 seconds. The crowd goes wild!

Back to Jeff

• The goal is to make their cloud solution this robust 
• 50000 organizations moved to Office 365 when it first became available 
• They will continue to support enterprises that want to keep SharePoint internal

Music Video about customers and how they’re leveraging SharePoint (eBAY, the Hub, EA Sports, Scotia Bank)

Speaker #2

Kurt Delbene - President, Microsoft Office Division

More on the Cloud vision – Are you sensing a theme yet???  

• 65% deploy social software tools
• 85% have a remote work force 
• 4 million millenials enter the workforce every year

The Office division’s vision:

1. Continue to lead in productivity. A connected ecosystem .

2. Cloud on your terms

3. Unified platform – no more silos

Office 365

• Where Office meets the cloud (Lync, Exchange , SharePoint, Office)
•  Tailored 365 to each tier of the enterprise.
•  Backed by Microsoft so it’s secure, reliable and well supported. Really hammering home the point they probably do it better than you can! I would not want to be calling India when SharePoint isn’t working properly, working my way through several layers of support to get the engineer that can help me.

Another video about an organization called NetHope who use Lync and SharePoint in the cloud to help numerous aid organizations work together. Demo with a guy from NetHope showing how they leverage Windows and SQL Azure combined with Office 365.

Big news!!! There will be another SharePoint conference next year at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Vegas is great and all, but that was the same city and venue as the last SharePoint conference. I'll just have to suck it up.