SPC09 - Day 1 impressions

So the first day of the SharePoint Conference 2009 (approx. 7400 attendees) I have attended the following sessions:

• Keynote by Steve Ballmer and Jeff Teper on SharePoint strategy and highlights
  
• Enterprise Search overview
  
• ECM for the Masses
  
• Web Content management
  

The keynote revealed the new product-line up ranging from on-premises to in the cloud and mixed.

In this new line-up the product formerly known as Windows SharePoint Services or WSS is now rebranded to "SharePoint Foundation (2010). I think this naming will make this core technology have a better fit in the stack.

Enterprise Search overview

The Enterprise Search session was most interesting as FAS and SharePoint are being integrated seamlessly to provide an optimal user experience. A new line-up was also introduced to support growing needs for search capabilities:

• Search Server 2010 Express (quick, easy powerful search, free)
  
• SharePoint Server 2010 (complete intranet search)
  
• FAST Search Server for SharePoint (High-end search delivered through SharePoint)
  

In terms of innovation new functionality includes (using FAST):

• Wildcard search (finally)!
  
• Search as you type (dropdown list showing existing/related terms when starting to type in the search box)
  
• Results refinement (similar to the faceted search web part, but integrated OOB. FAST also adds counters to this)
  
• Previews of result content (e.g. thumbnails and a slider showing PowerPoint slides for a particular result)
  
• Manageable sorting options (by specifying fields for this)
  
• Query suggestions (did you mean) and related searches
  
• Profile filtered pushed search results
  

ECM for the Masses

The new ECM capabilities were the highlights of the day. Using the new SharePoint 2010 platform, full and easy to use solutions can be built to support documents from creation to disposition.

Highlights include:

• A farm-wide (and what I have understood also cross-farm) managed metadata service application to managed hierarchical multi-language corporate taxonomies. One of the usage scenario's is to filter large document libraries using the hierarchal metadata (also integrated with Office 2010 applications) and drill-down
  
• Multi-stage retention plans
  
• A new concept called document sets which provides management capabilities for related sets of documents
  
• Documents ID's (content can now be labeled with unique numbers)
  
• Improved support for records management e.g.:
  
  • Holding and e-discovery
    
  • Records declaration (e.g. without moving documents from their original location)
    
• Windows Server 2008 R2 file share content management capabilities (e.g. allowing for rules based uploading and archiving in SharePoint). This is especially interesting in a co-existence environment
  

Web Content management

By far the least interesting session (ranked level 300, but rated 100 by me J). Innovations on web content management are somewhat limited in the new platform. Apart from the ribbon (which does make life easier for WCM), not too radical changes.

Highlights include Improvements in the CBQ web part (you can now use a page field value in a filter to e.g. display related content and options to display additional fields). Some highlights on the enterprise wiki, where the "[[" syntax now provides suggestions for making links to existing pages when you type. Apart from this, the wiki capabilities were somewhat limited to my expectations. Yes, it is now easier to upload and link images in a wiki page, but what about the typical wiki syntax?

What is very promising is the support for rich media like audio and video using a special Silverlight web part (skinnable) and an asset library optimized for managing audio/video.

So far some of the highlights, next the in-depth sessions that will follow in the next days