All fired up from the Keynote presentation, the delegates at the Tech Ed EMEA Developers conference all dispersed to the various breakout presentations across the conference centre. I headed off to the first of the SharePoint presentations on the Office Track. This was SharePoint Technology Past, Present, Future in a Software as a Service World. To begin with I was interested by the title, being as Microsoft are always keen to present themselves as a vendor in the Software plus Services space.

The session was presented by a name I knew well; Arpan Shah. In fact, if you search for "Arpan" in an internet search engine, he is most likely to be in the top one or two results in the search. Arpan explained at the beginning of the session why he was familiar, way back a number of years I was heavily involved in web development for large Internet sites and Arpan was well known in the Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) world and when this became part of Microsoft Office Server, so did he. His session was going to be a little bit of a history lesson, a little bit of a short term plan and a bit of long term plan. Unfortunately, he told us from the outset that he would not be disclosing anything about SharePoint 14 as this was too far away.

On the other hand, using the principle that it didn't count as disclosure if it had already been announced, Arpan reminded us that SharePoint Online would reach Europe in the first half of 2009, and that MOSS 2007 SP2 would be with us between February and April 2009. And he told us that SharePoint 14 would be 64-bit only.

Then to the presentation. In common with other SharePoint presentations featured a similar slide illustrating SharePoint's assistance with the principle of the Long Tail from the article by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine. The idea of the principle is that self service and individualisation will actually provide more that catering to the small majority of features in that 80% of functionality we try to implement. This idea relates quite well to SharePoint, but if you are really interested there is also an interesting debate on the principle that has been started by TheRegister about the empirical view of the Long Tail principle. I suspect that a version of the Long Tail will prevail, but the challenge of the debate should be helpful in providing some up to date empirical challenge to Chris Anderson's original ideas. Some elements are difficult to argue with, for instance that as IT is a limited resource that it has to concentrate its efforts somewhere. IT has a challenge in justifying that focus, and proving that it is as efficient at doing things as it should be. In the public facing world, web sites that have ridden the Web 2.0 wave like Facebook and Youtube and Amazon as a business model would seem to suggest that Chris Anderson has a point.

What they do prove is that for any kind of success you need People in the driving seat, and those people want functionality i.e. they want a service that they can understand and they don't particularly concern themselves with protocols, algorithms or architectures.

The presentation then considered SharePoint's place in provisioning these services to the enterprise and beyond, and to do this Arpan considered a history of the product. Going back a few years to consider products such as SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and 2001 Team Services, products absorbed like Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 and up to what we have today in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. With server products have been the tools to assist in configuration, design and development and there is a spectrum from the extensive work that can be done in the web browser, through the Office suite of rich client applications through to Visual Studio with the SharePoint extensions and their various project types and components.

We were then shown a demonstration of development of a web part and the process of debugging it. On this we were pointed to the newly published guidance from the Microsoft patterns and practices team. SharePoint Guidance - November 2008 covers design and architectural guidance for SharePoint including a reference implementation. I have not had the time to review this in detail but will cover it in this blog when I have opportunity. Some other tips came out in his presentation, including reminders not to modify the SharePoint database and remember to dispose of objects properly in code.

We then went on to look at a popular subject of late, Silverlight. Silverlight is of course up to version 2.0 now and can be considered to be fairly mature as a product, and it has been inevitable that it would be used to answer the challenge of all SharePoint implementations looking the same in that rather functional way that they do. It has the potential to be a great answer to the "Can you make it not look like SharePoint" request, providing you engage a proper designer. A key point to remember with Silverlight is that like a few other Web 2.0 approaches, a lot happens client side so you have a few options in arranging your architecture between Silverlight (a client technology) and SharePoint (a server technology). These should be pretty familiar however if you have any recent experience in web application architecture and deciding between server side, client side, ajax, web services etc.

Although a simple demonstration, we were shown a quick example of how Silverlight can interact with a library with a traditional map based mash up which came across as impressively simple - proof of the pudding will depend on a real business solution though.

We finished up with a look at futures and some confusing product naming, so apologies in advance if you read through this and end up confused. The recent PDC announced Azure with three service layers. One of these layers features something called SharePoint services, but this has not yet been released in any form (unlike the others, like Mesh which I already use in Beta) and is not the same as SharePoint online.

Something in the nearer future is SharePoint online, which should be arriving with us in Europe in the first half of 2009. This is a hosted MOSS 2007 solution in two brackets; standard is a multi-tenanted solution for implementations of under 5000 users, has certain limitations in what you can deploy to it and can take up to 1Tb of data. Dedicated can take over 5000 users and as the name suggests is hosted on dedicated hardware and comes with extra flexibility as a result. Both options support most (if not all) of the Microsoft Office desktop integration that is really helpful in organising documents. Arpan was really excited by the single sign on functionality of online, but I must admit that I will have to research better to form an opinion.

In summary, the presentation was like a few others in trying to sell SharePoint to developers which seem reticent to use anyone else's code that they think they can write themselves, although they have been happy for years to use the .NET Framework, ADO.NET etc and I hope it is just a matter of time before they get used to the services available in SharePoint.

Key Facts:

Session Code: OFC201

Speakers: Arpan Shah

Track: Office and SharePoint

Rating: 8/10

Attendance: 300 (95% full)