SharePoint Conference 2006 Notes

I recently had the opportunity to attend the SharePoint Conference 2006 in Bellevue, Washington, a conference entirely dedicated to the next version of SharePoint, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It was held in May at the Meydenbauer Center in the downtown area and featured lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on labs Monday through Thursday, and there was a partner-only migration planning workshop held on Friday.

Most of the sessions were extremely informative and had some really great demos. There were a few sessions I was disappointed with – for example, the workflow session was mostly lecture style with only one demo that showed building a very simple workflow using SharePoint designer. It was stated, but not demonstrated, that you can build workflows using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. I got the feeling the workflow stuff wasn’t as fully developed and stable as the other features simply because of the lack of substantive demos.

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A big push during the event was to use SharePoint as the foundation for building collaborative applications, rather than building them from scratch. Most workplace applications involve some type of data input which is then routed and/or transformed according to business rules, and of course saved to a data store. Using InfoPath forms, Windows Workflow Foundation, the SharePoint list user interface, and other out of the box functionality as high-level components which you glue together using VS.Net code (and for simpler applications no code at all), you can build applications far more quickly than if you built everything from scratch in ASP.NET.

My overall impression is that this is an extremely important software release for Microsoft, as they have obviously spent a huge amount of time and money on improving the product. It always felt to me like much of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 functionality was half-baked and the product as a whole, although extremely useful, was inconsistent in design and implementation. Microsoft has taken a huge step forward with this new release and it now feels consistent and functionally well thought-out. It shall be interesting to see how this initial impression changes as I get more practical experience with it.

There is much more to discuss (considering I was able to attend only 1/3 of all the available sessions throughout the week since there were always 3 sessions running in parallel at any given time) and I have only touched briefly on the material I did learn. I plan on making more postings about specific functionality in the near future.

To wrap up, I learned some general lessons about attending a development conference, which I relate below.

How to Attend a Conference

1. Plan out the sessions you will attend in advance of the conference. Typically a day is broken into time periods during which several sessions are taking place in parallel and you’ll need to figure out which ones are best given your interests, your organizations interests, and your present and future client requirements.
2. Get to each session 15 minutes early in order to get the best seats and stake out / claim a spot near a power outlet if your battery is running low.
3. Try to absorb higher-level information and associate what is being presented with existing knowledge rather than furiously trying to take down the slides. They will be forthcoming and are usually posted on the web far sooner than the conference DVDs mailed out weeks after the conference.
4. Make use of any question/answer periods after lectures. Even better, try to get access to the presenter after the formal session is over – you’ll get a much more interactive discussion than asking a question at a microphone and getting a response.
5. Make sure to use a heavy duty battery in your laptop and make sure it is fully charged every night
6. Bring along an extra-heavy duty battery and make sure it is fully charged every night
7. I saw a guy taking pictures of slides with a camera: a good idea if you absolutely, positively must have the slide information immediately. I kind of resented him, honestly, for having the ability to take away more information than me immediately from the conference.