SharePointPro Summit Notes: the unofficial version

While you've been slaving away, part of SharePoint nation has been living it up in Las Vegas this week. Yes, "living it up"--one SharePoint guy I spoke to said he hadn't been outside in 24 hours AND he hadn't done any gambling in the casino, if that's what you're wondering.

When you're attending sessions one after the other, with a break to stand out in the hall and guide someone back at the office through a crisis, it's little wonder you don't get outside much. Then again, walking through the casino on the way to the conference breakfast at 7 a.m. and seeing guys still sitting at the blackjack tables after a night of gambling highs and lows, it almost makes one glad to be heading to a session on SharePoint's Client-Object model rather than upstairs with a hangover and empty pockets. Here's the unofficial, whirlwind tour of what I observed from the SharePointPro Summit on Microsoft Day:

Microsoft's Steve Fox gave the keynote in place of the newly job-changed Tom Rizzo and when he asked if anyone was following what was going on nearby at MIX, the developer conference, only a few in the ballroom raised their hands. Which tells me the developers in the audience were either asleep, apathetic, or absent.

A rather tedious Microsoft presenter with very good slides said there were 500 Windows PowerShell cmdlets in SharePoint 2010, as he tolled the death knell of Stsadm in SharePoint 2015. Someone muttered beside me that Microsoft developers were getting lazy and putting the burden on admins.

In a later session,a guy from St. Louis, part of a SharePoint team, told me they had 16,000 users and said, "this had better be a good session--we need help." Indeed, a very good Microsoft presenter with very good slides appeared. He asked if the crowd would rather have the demo or the slides, but when the crowd picked the demo, he said he still needed the slides to get us through. So he flew through the slides. The demos were useful. He was also funny. When he asked how many had downloaded Visual Studio 2010, 2 guys out of 40 raised their hands; the crowd identified itself as basically half and half devs and admins.

He talked about upgrade issues you will deal with when moving to SharePoint 2010. Of course, he didn't say this in a bad way, but just mentioned things you'll have to watch out for--UI changes, large list query throttling, STP files not supported, some CSSs neededing to be redesigned, not all custom actions moving to the Ribbon, and so on.

In the lunch line, I was pleased to overhear some great comments about Todd Klindt's and Shane Young's presentation the day before. I'm looking forward to their session on Friday--Administering SharePoint Using PowerShell (the new coolness). But even cooler for a former Denverite, I met a guy who handles IT for the Denver Broncos. Looks like they'll be getting into SharePoint.

The expo reception was, appropriately, on St. Patrick's day evening, and the conference attendees strolled among the vendor booths and picked up information and sipped wine and beer. One guy told me he'd found the perfect SharePoint solution to what he'd been looking for for his company. I don't recall what it was, but I do recall that his solution needs sounded pretty complicated. (That was before the Guinness.) I managed to perfectly mix up my Active Directory duties with my SharePoint duties by confusing iDevFactory with the AD vendor DotNetFactory. Turns out, iDevFactory has been offering SharePoint management solutions since its Universal SharePoint Manager came out for SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Check out SharePointPro Connections for more blog posts from the conference.