Upon heading out to the Boston Logan Airport for the SharePoint User Conference in Las Vegas this past week, my expectation was to reconnect with a large number of business acquaintances, have some fun in Vegas and learn more about SharePoint 2010 beyond my current exposure via the Product Management team.  With a sold out crowd of over 8,000 people in attendance, I sensed the event would contain more chatter and a bit less substance.  I’m pleased to report that my expectations were dead wrong.

The show’s stars proved to be 1) SharePoint 2010 and 2) the practical and mature uses of SharePoint to solve real business problems and 3) the shear mass of 3^rd party add-on products/partners for the platform. 

First, the substantially enhanced functionality in SharePoint 2010 demonstrated that the product management team was really listening and reacting with relevant enhancements.   The inclusion of “Enterprise Content Types”, enhanced “SharePoint Designer Workflow” functionality, Silverlight’s rich interface, greatly enhanced Records Management capabilities, substantially improved web-content management and the global use of the now popular “Ribbon” represented a small sampling of new functionality.  Additional excitement was garnered around the introduction of a much richer “Social Networking” capability and Microsoft has substantially upgraded the Business Data Catalogs (BDCs) with the next incarnation of LoB (Line of Business) systems connectivity titled - “Business Connectivity Services”.  Coupled with the many functional enhancements was the underlying theme of greatly heightened scalability and large file support.    

I also had the opportunity to spend some time with Steve Ballmer’s keynote companions, Jeff Teper (MS Corporate Vice President for Office SharePoint Server) and Tom Rizzo (SharePoint Director).  I also met with a number of the key product management team members such as Ryan DuGuid, Tricia Bush, Evan Richman, Art Bettingrue, Annemarie Callahan and Mitch Gatchalian.   In talking with them, you could sense three underlying themes; 1) relief – to finally be ready for this conference was a huge ordeal and one that seemed to be very intense, 2) pride – SharePoint 2010 means no longer having to say “I’m sorry” as a result of the enhanced feature set in SharePoint 2010 and finally, 3) real-world experiences that allowed them to recognize the magnitude of the effort associated with successfully designing, deploying and supporting SharePoint.  For this team, there was no unrealistic panacea, but instead, a grounded perspective on what it would take to see SharePoint projects succeed.  They did well!

Second, there were a collection of great case studies from companies such as Kraft, Deloitte, Jones Lang LaSalle, Electronic Arts and so many others.  The underlying theme with all of these presentations; SharePoint was not merely a “broad collaboration platform” for the masses (to quote some well-known, but out-of-the-know analysts).  Instead, it was being used to solve a number of deep and pressing challenges that are now considered mission critical business functions.  The inherent ease of use, coupled with creative thinking and strategic planning allowed these solutions to come together on the SharePoint platform and the results demonstrated were quite impressive.

Third, I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the sea of 3^rd party add-on providers that were on the exhibit floor and “sharing” in the excitement around SharePoint continued momentum.  The usual suspects such as traditional ECM providers such as EMC, OpenText and OnBase were in attendance.  Their pitch sounds fairly similar in that they position themselves as the back end repository to SharePoint for Records and transactional document processing.  My personal opinion is that they need to further evolve their value proposition as more information continues to be stored directly and permanently into SharePoint repositories.  Other key supporting players such as KnowledgeLake, ConceptSearching, Idera, K2, SchemaLogic (also sponsors of www.sharepointgovernance.org) were there in force and they were well in tune with SharePoint’s continued success and their heightened value add.  Finally, some relative new comers, some newer than others, made the scene and were aptly rewarded for their presence.  These included companies such as StoragePoint (Blue Thread, Inc.) for their remote blob storage, X₂0 for streaming SharePoint to TV channels and other mediums and Pyxis|Mobile for integration with mobile phones.  The list was long and many were very interesting.  These were just a few that really caught my eye.

With all of the positive commentary stated, there are still areas that need to be further addressed and refined.  For example, the absence of support for physical records management means customization or 3^rd party product add-ons.  One day, I do hope they include support for columns with parent-child relationships.  There were some other items that I’d still like to see improved; however, when assessing the SharePoint 2010 balance sheet, the product’s assets far outweigh its liabilities and for this reason, I believe that SharePoint’s dominance in the ECM community will only gain more ground for the foreseeable future.  Nice job Microsoft!