So that's it – it is over – finished.
I have had a very busy time here. I have been on the go from 0600 hrs to midnight and beyond just about every night.
It is not just the sessions that you are here for but also the networking. It is about meeting people and companies who you would never have the chance of meeting anywhere else.
This conference has all been about MSS 2010 and what will be in it.
I think we were all disappointed that the beta was not released at the conference. However, it is better to get it right than to try and release half a product.
The big bets from Microsoft seem to be Social Networking and Taxonomy and search.
It looks as if social networking is coming to the Enterprise and you will be able to find experts in your company you never knew existed. You will be able to collaborate and interact with your work colleagues like you have never have done before. It remains to be seen whether companies will embrace Social Networking. The plumbing and features will be there in MSS 2010.
Microsoft have done a lot of work in the Taxonomy arena. Taxonomies can now be global across the whole of the enterprise. There is auto prompting for tags after you type in the first couple of letters. There is a new column type for metadata. The taxonomy import method is strangely via an Excel spread sheet not an XML file. No prizes for suspecting someone will put on codeplex before too long a routine to convert XML to MSS 2010 Excel Taxonomy format. It remains to be seen how many levels of nesting the MSS 2010 Taxonomy will support. Unconfirmed reports are that at the moment it may only be 4 which is not enough for IPSV.
There are, of course, lots more features announced at the conference. The most significant one for me was the support for pages which will be XHTML compliant and WCAG 2.0 "AA" compliant.
Please note that it is WCAG 2.0 not W3C "AA" compliant. The WCAG 2.0 standard is still a draft after 6 years ! It remains to be seen whether the UK public sector will embrace WCAG 2.0 or will doggedly stick to requesting W3C "AA" compliancy.
So 7,500 people have now got the knowledge to be able, in one way or another, to elucidate about MSS 2010 or even be able to create MSS 2010 sites. But we are at least 6 months away from the release of MSS 2010. The official line from Microsoft is "It will be released in the first half of calendar year 2010" so it could be as late as 30th June next year. However, Visual Studio 2010 will be released on the 22nd March 2010 and that contains an awful lot of SharePoint features so my guess is that MSS 2010 will ship around that time if all goes well. Microsoft are not going to make the same mistake as they did with MOSS 2007 and rush it out before it is ready. It remains to be seen if there will be a dip in sales of MOSS 2007 like there was with MCMS 2002 in anticipation of the release of MSS 2010. There are a host of improvements with MSS 2010 which get over a lot of the limitations of MOSS 2007.
MSS 2010 is a more mature product that MOSS 2007. Its limits have been greatly improved over MOSS 2007 in terms of the size of farms and the limit on things like document libraries and lists. Document Libraries can contain 10's of millions of documents and lists can go above the 2,000 list items that there was in MOSS 2007. Although there things in place to throttle back Lists that grow to over 2,000 or 5,000 or whatever the system administrators set the limit to.