TechEd Europe 2005

It was great to see so many people at TechEd Europe. There's clearly a lot of excitement for SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio.NET 2005. Selfishly speaking, A LOT of excitement for SharePoint Products and Technologies & CMS. One of the repeating questions I received this week was the future of CMS. I said it in my session, I said it in a blog entry, I'll say it again - the next version of CMS will ship with Office System. Packaging and Licensing are yet to be determined.

I spent time with Spencer Harbar, Stefan Gossner, Mark Harrison, Svetozar Georgiev and Tony Slogget on the CMS/SharePoint front. I also met with a few SPS Search partners like BAInsight and Ontolica - both good Search partners if you're looking for enhanced Search capabilities. They both leverage the SPS indexing and search engines but provide greater features/flexibility. Ontolica really focuses on exposing the richness of the SPS Search engine to customers by providing the ability to quickly create rich search query and results pages through a series of configurable web parts and XML files. Very good for customers who want to quickly build advanced search pages. BAInsight is an appliance and provides additional capabilities like query hit highlighting and other advanced search features. They are both reasonably priced - something that should be explored if you're using SPS search today and want more additional functionality w/o custom code.

Ok - better get back to the conference. Will blog more later.