SharePoint Conference 2006
I'm writing today from the Meydenbauer Conference Center in sunny Bellevue, Washington. Bill Gates just gave the keynote, and as always he was fascinating, a few cool demos were shown, there was a touch of revisionist history, and it gave everyone an aspect to think about.
Top Five Things Bill Gates Loves About SharePoint 2007
5. Community Features - Wiki, Blogs, RSS
4. Excel Services
3. Client Integration
2. Search and the Business Data Catalog
1. Integrated Applications
Bill's #1 needs a little explanation. It's really about the way that SharePoint is now an end-to-end application platform. It's a real extension of the way people work with each other and it doesn't just enable more efficient communication and discovery of knowledge; and really to me those are just cold words that sound more like marketing sound bites. Really, SharePoint is an organic extension of how we work, and this release makes it possible for that extension to feel natural.
I'll caveat this by writing that this release does not always feel natural. There are ways that the flow and layout of the presentation layer could be a lot better, but the underlying mechanics are now in place, on a unified platform, and this is a massive step.
So why doesn't it quite feel natural? Microsoft dogfoods their own work. But their culture is unlike most. Dogfooding Visual Studio in a software company resulted in the best IDE available. Dogfooding an environment for office workers (and really, why call them Information Workers? Let's show some product pride and call them Office Workers) in the same space results in another case of developers teaching end-users how to be developers. Office 12 is a big improvement, no question. But on the Office Server side we're not yet at the endgame. This could be easier and more obvious.
I'm encouraged by improvements through the O12 lifecycle. Some tasks are easier. The road warrior scenario of checking out and resynching entire libraries was shown today and it looks great. The hands-on demo I went through last night for creating and deploying content types leaves something to be desired. Let's hope there will be further progress between now and RTM next year.