10 Takeaways of SharePoint Conference 2011 Plus the Illusive SharePoint Visio Downloads

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Joel Oleson

There were a number of announcements during the keynote and other takeaways from throughout the week. Don’t know if you were following the twitter stream or live blogs, but I wanted to elaborate on what I learned from the SharePoint Conference.

Here’s the text of the keynote, video of the keynote, and here’s Dux collection of SPC11 videos, if you missed the #SPC11 #freezemob it was captured featuring @buckleyplanet and @cmcnulty2000

Download the Visio Stencil Kit for SharePoint 2010: Visio announcements by Richard Riley for Visualizing your SharePoint Farms. First download the SharePoint 2010 Visio Stencil Kit" should be a great tool for displaying your farms, and when combined with Visio Services for dynamically generating the diagrams should be awesome! Serious Visio SharePoint tools from
Microsoft shared on Codeplex is SharePoint Topology Data Collection and Visio SharePoint Network Topology Add-in
"Denali" with SharePoint 2010 makes High Availability even getting better! We already have a great high-availability story for SharePoint with Clustering, Log Shipping, Mirroring, and it only gets much bigger and much stronger with Denali. The new functionality that was demo’ed in the keynote with a 40 second recovery of 14TB database(s) with 7 thousand plus concurrent users. It’s called "always-on" and can already be demonstrated with CTP of Denali. Check out the keynote video of the incredible demo.
New Deployment stats to blow your mind! Great stats to commit to memory: More than 125 million SharePoint licenses sold to over 65,000 customers. "If SharePoint was a Software company it would be in top 50!" Over 700,000 SharePoint developers!!!
SharePoint Community events SharePint and SharePoint Saturday have squarely hit the radar! Jared just dropped SharePint and SharePoint Saturday! We have arrived. SPS is no longer under the radar! I’ll personally be participating in 3 SharePoint Saturdays in the coming weeks, and running one in December. Shout out to SharePoint Saturday Utah planned for December 2 & 3. Call for speakers

Pictures with Darth in SPC Vendor Hall
Block out your calendar for Next Year’s SharePoint Conference announced Nov 12-15 2012, in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay!
Office 365 was the Big Push by Microsoft during the keynote. Microsoft is HEAVILY invested. Kirt DelBene explained "80% of Office365 users have never run SharePoint or Exchange!" I had a chance to chat a prior colleague of mine in IT at Microsoft. He now runs the Microsoft IT tenant in Office 365. He tells me the maximum site collections a single tenant can host is 300. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Microsoft is eating their own dogfood in Office 365 as well. Sounds like tons of Microsoft’s own mailboxes are destined for Office 365 as well. I also ran into previous colleagues that now work in the dedicated team. They mentioned all the major logos you saw in the keynote were dedicated customers. It was comforting to hear that private cloud is alive and well. I really enjoyed hearing customers that said they were using Office 365 as an extranet. I see some promise for that scenario in my own work.
Office 365 Update Announcement: Next update in the coming months to will include BCS to remote web services!! Essentially the next rev will support connecting to external web services. There wasn’t much drilling into the capabilities of BCS, but the specifics were spelled out as remote web services which does make sense as something that could scale if the performance was even somewhat decent, and it also doesn’t require the components as something like connecting to an Oracle database would require.
Microsoft is very busy on 15 and it’s very hush, hush on purpose. Don’t treat the confidence lightly – I’ve seen a few blogs with speculation and it’s not worth it. People who speculate dates or features and try to bit torrent early bits are just hurting themselves. If you want early bits, go get in TAP (Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program). My nomination form is in (talk to your MS account rep if you have one), and I’m pinging people in my network on my willingness to invest in feedback and solid scenarios. Even if your company isn’t in the first round, there are lots of options, how about Project Server, Office, Lync, Exchange, or others that have connections that might have sway and be included in that wave of bits? Oh, and by the way Microsoft’s NDA is very serious, it’s your career and you’re putting on the line.
Vendor hall is a geek Playground – At the SharePoint Conference you didn’t have to walk to steps into the door before you saw AvePoint’s Ducati, or Quest’s Celebrity game show Bonk giving away gift card cash, take a few more steps and FPWeb is treating the SharePoint VIPs like royalty in their bar/speaker lounge above the booth. Brilliant! Want T-shirts how about 10? Books ask @joeypatterson about his 16 signed library he built at the conference. Then you’ve got Xboxes, Helicopters with Wifi, Massage, pictures with Darth Vader, and mustache’s and tattoos. I spent a lot of time this year hanging out at the vendor hall seeing what was new and who was new to the playground. It use to be a scary proposition to walk through a vendor hall… you felt like meat. The SharePoint community and the SharePoint vendors have done much to come together. I’ve spent a lot of my time coaching vendors and plans for future moonlighting in this area as well. I’ve partnered up with Bonnie Surma, one of the unsung SharePoint heros to help gather intel on the vendor community at the conference. She won the free ticket, but without a sponsor needed assistance filling in the gaps. She’s awesome and I’m so glad she was able to come to SPC! She’ll be gathering sponsors for future blog posts and ads sponsoring my quarterly travel now that I work at a nonprofit. (She can be contacted at joel.oleson@gmail.com or @sharepointmom)

CherPoint Mo – Cher Points at Mo at the OctoberFiesta Sponsored by Axceler, Blue Rooster,Jornata, BAInsight, and bunch more…

Vendors made a number of announcements

* Vendor links were included from BZMedia SPTechReport Newsletter recap.

10.The Value of SPC is in Networking, Spending Quality Time with Quality People Those who thought the most value of SPC was going to be in the vast variety of 260+ sessions was missing out, I have to say, the SharePoint social events at SPC set the bar *very* for any future conference. Networking at the official and non-official, and the extra super non official parties that happened was my favorite time spent. I could go on and on about the week in this aspect of how the networking was the most valuable of all of what I will take away. I heard some say, they spent their evenings catching up with work, and it almost made me cry. If you weren’t with me I don’t think many would believe the schedule I tried to hold. It wasn’t just about the talking, dancing, eating, singing, bowling, jamming, rugby matches, or hummer stretch limos, it’s about spending quality time with quality people from all over the world. Seeing friends from every continent and hundreds of countries around the world is the coolest experience. Loved every minute of it, and sacrificing a little (or a lot) of sleep to spend time with my friends was more than worth it. I say it’s a small world, but Disney says it even better. "It’s a small world after all!"

Joel, Mo, and Michael at Red Party sponsored by AvePoint

Can’t wait for next year’s reunion! Well I’ll satisfy my appetite by going to a few other SPCs around the world and renew my relationships in between times! See you at European SharePoint Conference, Slovenian Conference, Sharing the Point tour in South America, maybe Russian SharePoint Conference in the spring… and who knows… Antarctica & Uzbek?