This morning I attended the keynotes at the 2009 SharePoint Conference. I wanted to share just a few memorable quotes from the nearly three hours of buzz, content, and live demos about SharePoint 2010:
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Tom Rizzo shared the fun facts that there are over 7400 participants at the conference - up from 3800 at the 2008 conference in Seattle.
There are two couples getting married at the conference.
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Question 1 from an audience member: "With the current version of SharePoint it was difficult to find service packs and updates – will there be a page for the new version that contains the most current information?"
Steve Ballmer - “The right answer is yes - [turns to Tom Rizzo] what is the current answer?”
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Question 2 from an audience member: "Given the way things are changing on the web, and development cycles are quite long, how is development team keeping up with what’s on the web?... What are you doing going forward?”
Ballmer – "This notion of how fast things move and don’t move on the web is an interesting question." [He claimed that code is "not able to be written faster than it was 10 years ago – but it is able to be deployed faster than it was 10 years ago.” He finished up by saying that this foundation (SharePoint) is so stable that it gives partners a platform for development.]
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Question 3 from an audience member: "We're already talking about web 3.0, semantic web, social computing – what is vision for social computing moving forward?"
Ballmer - "We have taken a lot of steps not only toward the web 2 but the web 3 path. [Cited FAST, SP in the cloud, etc.] “With sharepoint 2010 we’ve taken a huge step forward, and I’m sure you’ll give us some push on some additional steps we need to take.”
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[Question 4 was about governance and I was not able to catch the response.]
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Question 5 from an audience member: "I build solutions for K-12 market... we have thousands of teachers who want to be able to update their sites, and they love their Macs. What are you doing to make that experience better for them?”
Ballmer – “There will be some things undoubtedly that only work on the PC, I need to be blunt about that.”
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Question 6 from an audience member: "Can we use VS 2010 to develop for SP 2007?”
Rizzo – "Unfortunately the answer is no."
Ballmer – "The VS improvements are targeted at the SP 2010 runtime…. This is a classic dilemma we face in the operating systems space... and SP is becoming more like an operating system."
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Jared Spartaro during his demo of the end-user features of SharePoint 2010, where he showed a document that was being edited by three users at the same time:
“The nice thing about co-editing is that I can watch other people do my work for me.”
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That's all for now - off to attend the afternoon sessions - more to come from this exciting conference!
