Friday, June 16, 2006

TechEd 2006: See Ya!

It's over. There will never be another TechEd 2006. Did you make the most of it?

For me, it was all about getting exposed to things that I've only read about, but didn't have a chance to play with. Ok, it was really about the networking and conversations that take place at events like this, but we'll tell my boss that it was about the sessions. ;-)

I think that Sharepoint 2007 wins my vote for best product coming out of this event. Not only does it appear that they finally got the architecture right, but it appears that MS products will use Sharepoint whenever they need a server-based presence (i.e., I was in a session that talked about publishing InfoPath forms to the web, and Sharepoint came up as a requirement). So, whether you realize it or not, you'll likely be running Sharepoint services from here on out.

The other exciting thing about Sharepoint Portal Server was that they combined Content Management Server into the same SKU. This strategy falls inline with what the other portals out there do (Vignette, WebSphere/WCM, etc).

Thanks anyone and everyone that I had conversations with, whether you knew me or not, or whether you'll remember me or not (I swear that every time that Mark Miller sees me, he says "You look familiar. Do I know you?"). It's been a blast!