SharePoint conference 2011: keynote

I'm at the sharepoint conference in Anaheim, california this week. At the keynote today a guy was on stage next to a server farm. And he was dj-ing. He is a sr technical product manager. And people are dancing in their seats. At least tom wilson and I are.

Conference theme is productivity delivered. It's also to honor the amazing things that customers and partners have done with sharepoint. It's a smart approach: if microsoft has no new features to share they can at least tells stories about the successes that the old features led to.

We were welcomed by Jared, who is in charge of sp product management. He introduced a lame video about interviewing actors to be the sp spokeperson. It stole the momentum that he built in his welcome to us.

3 guiding principles of sharepoint: redefining collab, unleash the ecosystem, builing a worldclass platfom.

Focus of redefining collaboration is: ux, social fabric, customers and partners.

In summary, the session was a bunch of hype, some MS execs looking excited like Google nerds, some case studies and a couple case studies.

My fav demo was where they showed a database hot failover for 7,000 concurrent users in about 10 seconds. (They had some heavy duty hardware on stage and unplugged one of the servers during the presentation. Cool!)

One of the speakers said that the product teams are running the cloud service office 365 at ms. The pressure is on the dev teams to make it work. I think this is interesting: forces those doing the development to consider how they will support the features because they are supporting them... Wonder what the impact on dev organizations will be.

Some stats mentioned:
- 25% of sp deployments are doing extranet deployments.
- next sp dev release will staff four times the ux and visual designers they had the last release.
-84% of people at companies work remotely
- 65% of companies are deploying at least one social tool
- 70% of it budgets are spent on siloed aging infrastructure
- There are 7,500 people here
- Sp is the biggest business at ms. 125m licenses sold.
- 65% of organizations have deployed enterprise wide.
(note: i may have flubbed some of these stats in copying them down. No sources were quoted.)

Noticed:
- the photo on the "reliable" slide has a light burnt out
- some women appeared in the photos in the presentation, but not onstage or in video :(

I have high hopes for this conference.