More info coming out of the conference. There's just waaaaaaaaay too much for one person to handle (I've met some folks that have 4 people from their businesses and they still say that there's too much info for them all to grasp). So, with that I wanted to hit the highlights of what I saw yesterday, and how they'll impact SharePoint work going forward.
SharePoint Development on Windows 7!
Yup, you heard it here first (well, not really first, but still). Matthew Burnett from Microsoft did a great session on this. SharePoint can now be installed on Windows 7 (and Vista SP1) machines. Couple that with Visual Studio 2010 (currently also in beta) and the other requisite tools, you can now do SharePoint development w/o the need for a Server OS. No more running through hoops to get development tools installed on servers. This is a really huge thing. Couple this with Window's virtualization technology, you can also create a .VHD (Virtual hard Disk) that Win7 can boot to, and have it run just like a host OS, with access to all resources (that means that if your machine/lappy has 8GB, the .VHD you booted from will have it). This is a HUGE step forward in SharePoint development. Yet another reason to move onto Windows 7. But you're already on it, right? Right?
SharePoint Online
This has been in the news for a bit, but the details coming out of this are great. At the highest level, for businesses/enterprises that don't want to have to deal with all of the effort for the care and feeding of the infrastructure, patches, health, etc. a hosted solution becomes very, very appealing. They announced a number of clients that are on this (one of them Coca-Cola) and more moving onto it. Now granted, there will be some limitations when you're on their Standard plan (shared hardware/infrastucture) like custom coding, branding initiatives, and the like. If you're on their Dedicated service you have more flexibility, but again, you'll be paying for that. The Standard plan starts for 5 users, the Dedicated starts at 5,000. But still, at a higher level, moving to the "cloud" for a SharePoint implementation just brings up all these new opportunites for those resources that are now freed up because of this.
More to come...enjoy! - M