Report card: SharePoint 2010 – A; Conference organization B; Steve Ballmer: D
SPC2009 in Vegas is 7000 geeks ignoring the fleshly lures of sin city and scurrying from session to session clutching their cell phones and notebooks while each trying to look nonchalantly like they just understood everything in the last session. Not!
Truth #1: SharePoint 2010 is a very large and complicated thing. Microsoft are struggling to call it what it is. It’s a platform, a matrix of applications, the way from here to the future of middleware. However you describe it, it’s easier to use than SP2007, so long as you grasp 40 concepts and hold them all in your mind simultaneously. I may leave Vegas with a good understanding of what Microsoft are SP2010, but there is surely a long training road ahead before I start consulting in it. One has to focus and be selective. I’ve chosen the new searching functionality and “ECM for the masses” as my two areas of interest. That will keep me plenty busy.
Truth #2 Steve Ballmer needn’t have turned up. The opening keynote speaker sauntered on stage in an ill-fitting suit and scuffed shoes and read from the teleprompters for 45 minutes while pacing across the stage telling us how enthusiastic and excited he is about SharePoint. His body language and general demeanor said exactly the opposite. He was dull, dispassionate, carrying the air of a man who wanted to be somewhere else. He talked airily about ‘the future’ and how SharePoint was going to take Microsoft there. I always worry when the CEO chooses to talk about the indistinct future rather than about the concrete tomorrow. It was unconvincing. In passing, as if it hardly mattered, he mentioned that the beta release of SP2010 would be ‘sometime in November’. What?! You’ve got 7000 SharePoint enthusiasts to give up 5 days of life, travel hundreds/thousands of miles and pay thousands of dollars, and you can’t even clean you shoes or get a beta release to us in time for the conference? Sigh.
Next up was Jeff Teper, in a suit that fitted him, shiny shoes, with a spark in his manner and a well prepared message as he overviewed the new release with humor and flare. I thought I heard the sound of a helicopter taking Ballmer on to something more important.
Truth #3: Microsoft can put on a great conference but I think the leap from 3800 last year to 7000 this year has strained them a little. The WiFi only works in some rooms, the sound system is horrid – being only intelligible in the center of the rooms, and sessions are switched from room to room without any notice. I missed the first 15 minutes of two sessions today just because that’s how long it takes to slog up or down two floors in this gargantuan location.
Noodles with friends in the evening then off to bed for some zz’s. Let’s hope tomorrow finds me able to get into the product more…
