Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Review

We are fresh off the conclusion of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA and it was fantastic! The conference provided us with several insights, but most noteworthy that SharePoint is growing, and growing rapidly! You could see this everywhere, in the amount of attendee turn out (~7,500), the number of sponsors and sessions, the worldwide diversity of attendees, and the amount of social gatherings every night. We knew going into it that because it was a mid-production cycle conference that no major news would probably be announced and that was immediately evident in the keynote remarks regarding how this year’s theme was productivity. This was featured in many of the session topics, whether it was business automation using composite solutions, FAST, or being more efficient with the cloud.

I’ve highlighted what I think were the biggest takeaways from the event. However, I’m sure I am missing some as I was obviously able to neither attend every session nor keep up with the roughly 3 tweets per second for #SPC11.

• SQL “Denali” and AlwaysOn, Microsoft’s new solution for SQL Server regarding high availability and disaster recovery for mission critical applications.
• Forrester Research Results
  • Versions Installed
    • 65% now have SharePoint 2010 installed
    • 57% still have SharePoint 2007 installed
    • 11% still on SPS2003 (this number surprised me)
  • SharePoint Deployment Timeframe
    • 59% able to deploy SharePoint at the pace they expected
    • Of the other 41%, 59% said it was delayed due internal technical issues, 41% lack of governance, 28% users adopted more slowly
• The release of the Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010
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• SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-In for Visio released which adds a Visio add-in and timer job to SharePoint to pull farm topology details.
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• SharePoint 2010 Podcasting Hands On Lab released – learn how to build your own podcasting site!
• A new elite certification called Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) – which requires a pre-requisite of Microsoft Certified Master (MCM)
• 4 times the amount of employees for User Experience currently working on the new version of SharePoint
• Updates coming to Office 365, including BCS for remote web services.
• Next conference is scheduled for Nov 12-15 in Las Vegas where speculation is that Microsoft will announce the next version of SharePoint

If you have not attended a conference in the past, I highly recommend you attend the next one. This is one of the best opportunities to network with leading experts and gain knowledge directly from Microsoft, MCMs, and MVPs. I feel that next year will be the year for governance, composite solutions, and the continued push to the cloud. Even with SPC11 in the past, we have a lot to look forward to!