Disjointed Conversations: Day 2 In Seattle

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May 16, 2006

Day 2 In Seattle

Today was day 2 of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2006. The day started with everyone talking about the weather. It was absolutely perfect. It was in the 80’s with zero humidity. Like I said perfect.

At the conference the day started with breakfast and an interesting conversation with 2 guys from England. They are using Groove for sharing SharePoint document libraries with their clients. Cool stuff, that I played around with tonight at the labs. Unlike last night when the labs where packed, we pretty much had the run of the place with the Microsoft guys wanting to know if we wanted to play xbox with them (we said no).

	After breakfast we packed into a room and listened to the keynote address by the Nerd King. It was fairly bland, and while I am certainly a fan, the man is no rock star. Here he is the richest man in the world, and yet he looks and acts like any of the hundreds of geeks sitting in the audience. After the keynote it was time to hit the first seminar of the day. Charlie and I have gone through the list several times, and we have done our best to make sure that we hit different events. So I went to an overview of Web Content Management, while Charlie went to Designing and Developing Composite Applications.
After that seminar it was lunch time. Now, supposedly there are only supposed to be a 1000 people at this thing, but I think it is way more then that. In fact, there where so many people that several hundred of us went across the street to the Bellevue City Hall where we were treated to a southern bbq style lunch. The food was ok, but the lines where horrible. The building and surrounding park where really beautiful, and there is something relaxing about sitting in this park, the sun shining and looking at snow covered mountains in the distance.
	Crappy picture of the snow covered mountains behind the best buy
After lunch, Charlie and I both attended a seminar on Blogs, Wikis and RSS – it was not the greatest. The presenters were young, and nervous and they spent way to much time on what blogs, wikis, and rss is and not enough on how it is hooked into SharePoint. Our experiments in the lab, seem to indicate that they are fully hooked into everything – especially RSS. After that it was time for the final seminars of the day. Charlie went to a search technical drill down, and I hit records management and compliance. Now I know very little on this subject, but it was actually very cool to see how MS has this all hooked up and running in SharePoint. I played around with it tonight, and I can see where a lot of clients may want this.
	So the day ended with a stroll back to the office and then dinner at a Mexican Restaurant.
	I immediately recognized it as the restaurant we (Brian, Greg and I) would park in while Brian would run into this Starbucks.