Anthony Milner

Have been geeking out at Office DevCon 2007 this weekend held at Microsoft’s Sydney Headquarters in North Ryde. Wearing a campaign monitor t-shirt, eating pizza and getting turned on by Sharepoint Excel services it dawned on me that I am becoming a total geek J. If you spend the greater part of your day using (power user) or developing in the MS Office environment then this event is for you. Being able to talk to various MVP’s and see working demo’s was really good.

Conference snippets…

• SharePoint search has support for thesauri beyond the simple synonym concept. The concept of broader and narrower terms can be implemented
• SharePoint Excel services can expose only the parts of your workbook you want displayed e.g regions and graphs – Additionally BI indicators can provide high level summary based on data in the spreadsheet
• Learnt how to stop an image from sliding around in Word – the key, images anchor to paragraphs, not to mention =RAND(n,x) a useful feature to get n paragraphs each with x lines of sample text in your word document – Thanks Shauna Kelly
• Mick Badran has written a ranking tweak to adjust the SERP’s weighting based on filetype.
• Adam Coggan declared – “Sharepoint Internet connector pricing is broken”- $30,000 is a hefty price tag especially if all you intend to do is expose “a couple of pages” to the web. Hardly a compelling business case for collaboration.

If you’re looking for WSS and MOSS 07 books I was referred today by our Microsoft partner manager to a comprehensive Sharepoint document library which lists 53 titles.

I came away from day one of the APAC SharePoint Conference with two thoughts swirling around my head…

• First thought – This is an outstanding platform and I want it in our armoury as we head out to solve the information management challenges of the enterprise (and the SME?).
• The second thought – Licensing? Why is it that every time I ask a Microsoft specialist the dreaded licensing question I receive in quick succession a nod and then a chuckle, then an answer which leaves me feeling like a hot potato?

Is licensing the “bad boy” at Microsoft? SharePoint is an extremely compelling offering but there needs to be simplicity in licensing to make it work. Maybe it needs a top down shakeup akin to the big security push of 2001? There are so many web 2.0 collaboration tools out there, they may not have the extensibility and scalability of SharePoint but what they do have is functional and licensing clarity, and that can make a huge difference.

If anyone can point me to a clear and concise explanation of the Sharepoint 2007 licensing model for external websites, extranets and intranets, then I’d love to hear from you.

A few of us are attending a SharePoint conference at the Hilton Hotel over the next two days. A good cross section of our company is attending which should allow us to cover most sessions across multiple streams as we continue our build up of MOSS 2007 skills. We’ve already had a few Microsoft Information Worker demonstrations but they’ve only touched the surface. It will be great to dig a bit deeper and see some hands on demonstrations.