SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas report part3

Hi friends.

Monday, first Session day!

First out efter we had breakfast was the Keynote, this time same as last year with Jared Spataro (Senior Director Product Management) and Jeff Teper (Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Business Platform)
One of the first things that Jared said during his talk, was this: ’It’s not just a product, it’s a way of life’…I agree, to a certain degree you have to be ‘special’ to like this Product…
Next he told us that we were over 10.000 participants from over 85 different countries…the event has over 200 sponsors and it is getting to be a big deal. Similar event are held in smaller scale all over the globe, but there is only one ‘real’ SharePoint Conference…
It was a bit of a prep talk and that is Always nice…next Jared presented the next speaker, Jeff Teper, the ‘Father of SharePoint’ who has been with the product since the very beginning.
Jeff talked a bit about the 3 legs, or layers that they had in mind during the development of the Product.
– Experiences
– Innovation
– Ecosystem
The thought behind this was that this was what was needed in order to really take Another step from SharePoint 2010 without changing it all.
– Experiences is all about the user experience, this has gitten a huge lift, in terms of gui but also performance and usability.
The SHarePoint interface can now more than ever be percieved as a windows application, this since SHarePoint now dont repload the entire page whatever you click at, but only reloads the parts of the screen that is needed. This improves performance but also enhances the overall user experience a lot. Behind this is a new structure, for instance the image compression is hugely enhanced, the ribbon that Before in 2010 took 400KB to load, now only takes 100KB over the network.
All in all, the page dataload has been decreased with 40%.
Jeff demoed a lot in SHarePoint Online, and Everything Went as smooth as an onprem solution, later he told us that he was running SharePoint online against the datacenter in Europé, Amsterdam, this to show all of us that performance would not be an issue. If the performance when fully released is what it was today, I will never again complain about it, but we will have to see if that will be true when generally available.
One ore thing is that you only load delta data from content that has been changed. A Word file of 10MB does not have to be loaded again over the net because 1MB of content has been added, it only loads the new 1MB and that is also all that is saved to the database.

He also showed us drag and drop of files into the browser, this is also supported on all supported browsers, no more Active X controles…
You can now easily see exactly who has access to your site or document.
Search has been thry a major improvement, this time, FAST has been integrated into SharePoint search and that gives us a lot of new features.
Preview of documents in search results is something that will be easily liked by customers.
One less fantastic thing during Jeffs session was that they spent about one hour on Yammer. As I see it, Yammer is still not part of SharePoint and should not have a Place at the SharePoint Conference keynote. I can see why Microsoft would want to promote it, but as long as it is its own Product, I’m having a hard time seeing why we should spend a lot of time on it. That can be done by the Yammer Techs…

Scott Guthrie came out and showed a lot about the Ecosystem, thats the new CLoud app model and that was really interesting. He showed us how easy it was to develop an application in VS, test it locally and then deploy it to SharePoint. You could also easily put the code parts in Azure and same thing, deploy directly from Visual Studio. Neat!

After the Keynote I got to see Three different session, all were very good and held a high quality.

SPC219 SharePoint 2013, Whats new for IT professional
Bill Baer, Product Manager SharePoint, told us at a very high pace about the news in 2013.
A lot has happened after all and the biggest applause was for the promise, that this time, the UPS will work configured from the Central Administration GUI as it should 🙂

SPC083 Deployment wizard: SharePoint 2013 Installation, tips, tricks ans scripts
MVP Dan Holme talked about deployment in 2013 compared to 2010. He showed the small differences and what is missing.
The main takeaway that I allready knew, setup is pretty much the same as in 2010…

SPC119 Designing your SharePoint 2013 Enterprise deployment
Based on SharePoint online experiences, they showed how a Enterprise farm Environment should be designed.

We finnished the day with some snacks and a few beers, compliments of Microsoft Sweden that was so kind to treat all of us Swedes here to a pre-evening at the ‘Something’ Grill. Very nice and Amazing how many Swedish participents there are! I would guess over 200.

I met a few old collegues from Microsoft Sweden and when the free beer stopped coming, we Went on, to the House of Blues one more and then the day was over for me.