Following the keynote this morning, and after proving once again that maps are my enemy, I arrived five minutes late to the breakout session in which I was most interested today: Introduction to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: An Overview.
That presentation name is quite a mouthful, eh? Well, if anyone was going to be up to the challenge (in 75 minutes!) of living up to that title, it would have to be the Tom Rizzo, Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Rizzo provided a high-level overview at suitably high-speed (there was that 75-minute deadline to contend with), wisely choosing to go light on the PowerPoint slides and heavy on the demos.
Rizzo provided demos of the native SharePoint blogs, wikis, Enterprise content management, and My Site functionality, and would have been able to show off the new Enterprise Search feature as well ... except he had installed the Hotfix version on his laptop and, well, it didn't quite take. He promised Enterprise Search demos at the booth for anyone who wanted to see it in action, and his advice to everyone was, "do as I say, not as I do," and wait for the MOSS Add-On pack which will ship at the end of the month, including infrastructure & Federation updates.
As anyone who's been following my blogging over in SharePoint Blank knows all too well, I'm a relative newbie when it comes to SharePoint, which should explain why the high point of the presentation for me was the demo of how tightly integrated SharePoint is with Outlook 2007. Yes, sad though it may be, this feature was news to me, and the fact that this very cool Outlook integration (You can instantly and seamlessly import SharePoint lists and document libraries into Outlook? Who knew? Don't answer that, please) is available in WSS and not just MOSS makes it even cooler still.
In other news: Did you know that, as of this very week, podcasting is now available in SharePoint? It's true, and the open source podcasting kit is available for download now over at CodePlex (and at no cost to you).
As a final note, Rizzo mentioned early in his presentation that they'll be "investing even more in user experience in the next release in terms of usability and Web 2.0" features. At times it was difficult to discern if Rizzo was speaking to WSS or MOSS, but given the "Web 2.0" mention, I expect this reference had to be regarding the MOSS experience. And, speaking as a SharePoint newbie, usability improvements would be a most welcome addition, so this was great news.
Posted
Jun 10 2008, 05:23 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.