Summary of Sharepoint Conference 2009

Ok, so there is one more day left at the conference, but we will be going home in the morning so I think it's time to sumarize the conference from a BI point of view.

I will divide this in Reporting, Monitoring, Analytics and a general sharepoint category. I havent heard one word about planning, so that is completly out of the picture from microsoft.

Reporting> Reporting services 2008 R2 is a great release! It feels like it is a stable and powerful product and together with the new features I think it will be a pleasure after upgrading. Except from maps, nicer looking charts and inline graphics and charts I think connecting multiple datasets to an object is one of the enhancements made.

Monitoring> Not so much has happened on the surface of performance point except the proclarity decomposition diagram. But a lot of work have been made integrating pps in sharepoint, and it's now more or less fully integrated. No more web sites "on the side". Excel services and Office web applications is also really cool. You can both view and edit a word, excel, powerpoint etc online without the client installed. They made an example of two people playing battleship on BI Power Hour. Cool!

Visio Services is a cool new addition to this area. Another way of visualizing information.

Analytics> The main topic here is Gemini a.k.a. Power Pivot. Really cool in memory database that can handle massive amount of data. However, I wonder how many users really are interested in this. I would say it's one or two per big company... Well, we will have to think and analyze this a bit further to see the true business value in this.

General Sharepoint> A lot of things is happening with collaboration and social computing. Everything is getting integrated and starting to feel like facebook. My site is developed, personal blogs and wikis, team sites. Things are starting to feel more mature.

Another thing is offline access to information. A lot of things is happening here. This is a part of the strategy, BI for everyone.

Cloud computing, Sharepoint Online is a strong focus from microsoft, that was made totally clear...

Finally, everything withing the office family is moving into Sharepoint. Integration is the key, so expect more on that area.

That's it for now.