SharePoint Conference 2006

I spent the week at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2006 learning all about the latest widgets inside of the upcoming version, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). What a fantastic event! There has been a lot of buzz around the advances made in "v3" compared to what is available today in v2.

This is a photo of Joel Oleson, a Technical Product Manager in the SharePoint product group, and the guy who lured me to MMS. (I think he wears this hat a lot when he thinks nobody is looking)

Without getting into too much detail of what is in the upcoming release, (I’ll write about a couple aspects of v3 in later posts) where I, personally, see the biggest bang in the upcoming version is business intelligence (BI). Having some history in the BI space, I have to believe this is going to be a major driver in the growth of SharePoint over the next couple years as people realize they can get the key functionality they require without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on standalone BI applications. Plus, with SharePoint as your intranet/internet/extranet solutions, it puts your tools into context with your business needs: your teams can work within a single framework, share documents and work processes from a single team space, and link to / integrate with relevant line of business (LOB) applications.