The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Short version: I’m dead tired, 2008 Launch was very cool, L.A. traffic sucks and I can’t wait to go to Seattle next week!

Full version:

Man it’s been a while since I last blogged here. I’ve started doing some Dynamics CRM and infrastructure projects on top of SharePoint projects galore averaging too many hours/week. But that’s another story…

I went to the Heroes Happen {Here} Tour 2008 Launch event in Los Angeles today. Unfortunately I missed Tom Brokaw’s opening speech, but was pleasantly surprised to see Steve Ballmer there! I had never seen or heard him speak in person so that was pretty interesting. He had a couple of semi-stumbling moments, but nothing too major. The speeches were well organized with demos of the 2008 stuff (Windows Server, SQL, and Visual Studio) by their respective product managers (I think?) in between. I’m too fried to recall everything that was mentioned but the gist of it is basically this:

• Windows Server 2008: better security, better IIS, even php applications are being hosted on Server 2008!
• SQL Server 2008: Best performance of all time of all databases, better security compared to Oracle, all other databases belong to Microsoft.
• Visual Studio 2008: intellisense all around, better team integration with Expression Blend for better developer + designer collaboration.

Now the thing that really caught my attention the whole time wasn’t even Microsoft related, but the quality of the venue’s staffing! From the moment I stepped out of my car and into the main lobby I was greeted, and attended to as needed every 20 feet, literally. This was perfect since the keynote and sessions were in 2 different buildings with lots of twists and turns in between. All lines were extremely organized, lunches were on time, snack tables were always full and trash cans mostly empty. That was world-class hospitality right there, props to the L.A. Convention Center staff for that and Microsoft for footin’ the bill.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 – Seattle, WA

See you there? I was lucky enough to sign up pretty early so I’ll be there – staying at the W. If you see me around feel free to say what’s up! Last time I said that I was able to meet some really cool people @ DevConnections in Las Vegas so yeah… feel free to leave a message here if you want to meet up or otherwise, maybe I’ll see you there! 🙂

*yeah, I know what you’re thinking…. we all look the same… :p