Well, thus ends the first "real" day of Connections 2007… Lots of good warm-up stuff to get everybody on-deck for tomarrow and the begining of some of the deeper dive sessions… Here's a couple notes I got from the conference:
Tom Rizzo gave a couple good presentations today, and pointed out a number of little known tidbits, resources, and a news announcement (with demo). First, the tidbits:
Annonymous access being enabled will disable the ability to set item-level permissions in a list. I didn't know this. This is appearently by design, as there were a number of complexities in the security model, or at least that is the assumption presented.
Another great bit is that apparently the ISA guys played really nice with the OWA guys from Exchange 2007, and as a result, internal SharePoint sites that are linked/embedded in an email message can can be passed through ISA from the Internet when ISA is configured properly. That is, without any proxy or vpn.
Next, the resources:
Tom gave some examples of public facing Internet sites on SharePoint… The first few are well know examples everyone points to… The last few, not as much.
- Hawaiian Air
- Glu Mobile
- TV Guide – While this looks like MOSS, it is actually an AJAX front end to a MOSS back-end.
- Migros - A good example of localization for a site (foreign)
- Viacom/MTV – with a redirector to hide the "pages" from the URL, and a flash plug-in in the middle of the page
Additionally, I gleened the following resources from Tom's presentation…
- MS included a BDC editor in the August SDK for MOSS 2007. I missed this one, so I'll have to check it out.
- The SharePoint Learning Kit has excellent resources for assembling End User Training, and follows the SCORM training methodologies.
- The End User Training Blog at Microsoft has been available for a bit over a month now.
Lawrence Liu also had a few gems to share, as well as reiterating some of ones given earlier by Tom:
- Adding fields from a custom content type to a document library will cause files opened (or created) to show the "Document Properties" toolbar with the appropriate MOSS fields in Word or Excell 2007.
- Many people know about the Calendar and Task 2-way syncronization with Outlook, but many people overlook the contact and discussion forum 2-way sync that also exists. The document lirary 1-way (read-only) view was supposed to be 2-way, but appearently there we issues around conflict resolution and the quality of this syncing that kept the 2-way version out of the release… Might be back on the table in the next version
- For those that did not know, Lawrence is a huge FaceBook and OpenSocial fan… Not so big on MySpace… In fact he scolded those who admitted to having them See Lawrences FaceBook Profile here.
- The MS Fanastic 40 can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/templates.mspx
Tom also announced (after leading a blurry eyed Vegas crowd that was still desperate for more coffee/caffeinated pop/<insert stimulant of your choice here>) Microsoft Search Server 2008 (MSS), and its Express counterpart, which are in Beta now, and will ship in 1Q08. basically a rewrapped MOSS for Search, with a better admin console, and best of all… wait for it… Federated Search. Cool stuff… uses the OpenSearch Standard Amazon helped set. Good news for use MOSS users too… There will be an upgrade pack to add the new features in to Full MOSS… downside is, it will not be released until probably 2Q08.
I also had a fun time at Andrew Connell's after-hours get together… It was cool getting to put some faces to the voices I've talked to and the names I've read…
The rest of the day was a blur, as I met way too many vendors in a row, and forgot to bring my notebook to any other sessions. I now have approximately 2 1/2 tree's worth of vendor handouts in my hotel room, covering half the couch and two chairs. If I get a spare week or two, I'll read through all the pamphlets and post something about the good ones (I must be a masochist).
I'm also now the proud owner of 5 demo CD's, 4 logo-covered pens (2 of which don't seem to work), 3 sticky note pads, 2 T-shirts that don't fit, and a backpack that doesn't fit my laptop or the ream and a half of papers I collected… Hmmm… Reminds me of Christmas… Well, my kids will be happy… Look what daddy got you from Vegas!
Roll on tomorrow! High-lights I'm looking forward to are Dustin's SPD for Developers (we'll see if he can get a wave out of everyone before lunch), and it's a toss-up whether I'll hit Todd's SSO in the real-world or Andrew's Building Publishing Sites with WCM… only time will tell!
josef.nielsen