Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Keynote Thoughts

The keynotes this morning at SPC11 were great Microsoft marketing. We heard about all of the hopes and dreams the product team has (probably driven to a large degree by the Marketing folks) for SharePoint use and adoption. We heard that Office365 is taking off like gangbusters and solves a whole class of somewhat unidentified problems. We saw a cool demo of a 1.4Tb content SharePoint Farm with 7500 concurrent users (not coincidentally, the number of SPC11 attendees) failing over when they pulled the plug on one if the SQL servers running Denali. (Big applause for that, but it’s sort of over my head. Clearly cool and good, but over my head.) We saw some cute and funny video filler with some Hollywood stars like Luke Perry, Alan Thicke, and Carmen Electra.

For things who came to SPC11 hoping to hear a lot of new, inside scoop about the next version of SharePoint, the keynote speeches were probably a disappointment. The only “news” I gleaned was about the upgrade to Office365 which is coming by the end of the year. I’m sure that the failover demo contained something which amounted to an announcement as well, but as I mentioned, not my focus.

The coolest thing I learned about the keynotes (from a little birdy afterwards) was that SPServices was used under the covers to show the graphics for the NetHope voting application shown at the end. Since it’s not a Microsoft tool, Chris Johnson didn’t mention it in his demo, but it was there. Very cool, and validation that SPServices should be a part of your development toolkit.