SharePoint conference 2009

I had a chance to spend a couple days at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas.  It was a surprisingly good trip and conference.  Here's what I learned:

• SharePoint 2010 is going to be a very big release for that product.
• The best part is the business intelligence integration.
• The correct amount of time to spend in Las Vegas is 2 days.

The most exciting thing I saw was a project that was once called "Gemini", now called PowerPivot.  PowerPivot is a plug-in to Excel 2010 and a server component that is part of SQL Server 2008 R2.  I knew PowerPivot as an in-memory OLAP engine that supports very large datasets on the client.  If you're working with large datasets, its is really damn impressive.  What I saw at the conference was some of the back-end dashboards that support user and connection management.  The dirty little secret of "self service BI" is that it can quickly turn into a "self service data warehouse", running on a wayward server under someone's desk.  PowerPivot can't possibly solve the massive replication/export problem, but it at least makes it a little more manageable by adding easy to use metrics on the server.  Administrators can view the amount of data and connections used by the various PowerPivot clients.  That makes it easier to understand how much data is moving out of the managed base tables of a data warehouse into client managed "mashups".

here's a decent preview of the performance of the client:

One downside is that Microsoft is using its formidable powers of confusion and complexity to make the purchase process off-limits to all but the bravest licensing ninja's.  One of the conference sessions was "licensing and SKUs".  I realize how much it helps to understand the mass of jello that is Microsoft licensing, but I really wanted to go remind everyone that attended that session that there are less mind-numbing options in the other sessions.

more to come as PowerPivot matures and I get my CTP copy...