SharePoint Conference 2011–It’s a Wrap!

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It’s hard to get a grasp of just how far reaching and impactful SharePoint is these days, but an event like SharePoint Conference helps those of us who use and work with the product every day to visualize how absolutely HUGE SharePoint really is.  During the keynote it was announced that if SharePoint were it’s own standalone company, it would be among the top 50 software companies in the world. With a sellout crowd of over 7,500 attendees and a massive exhibit hall with a lot of energy, you can see SharePoint’s impact firsthand. Here are some other fast stats from the keynote about SharePoint if you like to look at the numbers:

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  • Over 125 million licenses sold to over 65,000 customers; 62 million SP 2010 licenses
  • 80% of Fortune 500 companies have SharePoint
  • 67% of our enterprise customers have deployed SharePoint for everyone
  • SharePoint 2010 is rated #1 in satisfaction, awareness, market share, and likelihood to recommend
  • Over 1,100 books written about SharePoint
  • 80% of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint internally. About a third of those also use SharePoint for external collab, or public-facing web-sites.

So what was the focus of SharePoint Conference 2011? From my perspective it was all about best practices, sharing customer and partner stories, and learning new ways to get even more value out of the SharePoint platform. SPC11 surfaced a lot of moments where attendees said, “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that.” Even coming in with years of experience on SharePoint I learned a lot at the conference, from hearing how our customers use SharePoint, to seeing up-and-coming technologies like Project Crescent, as well as several different partner products built on top of SharePoint.

The main topics I attended focused on search (mostly FAST, but some basic SharePoint search), business intelligence, and partner and customer solutions and stories.

Nate’s Unofficial SharePoint Conference Awards

Top Shenanigans

There are some very passionate SharePoint folks out there. From twitter, to Freeze Mobs, to screaming monkeys, and many, many SharePints and other Share-name-your-event. At any rate, I got a kick out of the Freeze Mob that was organized. Video here.

Most Creative Booth

There were a ton of unique giveaways and booths at the conference exhibit halls and parties. But my favorite just in terms of booth creativity was LaserFiche.  They had a booth offering free massages – all you had to do was put on headphones and learn about their products and solutions on a screen under the massage chair.

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Favorite shirt/giveaway

Lots of great shirts were handed out at the exhibition hall from all of our partners. My personal favorite was BA-insight’s ‘Eat, Drink, SharePoint’ shirt. Love it!

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And the fun announcement at the end of the keynote, was also welcome news to all the attendees. SharePoint Conference 2012 is planned for November 2012 in Las Vegas. There is already a lot of excitement around this event.

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Additional Info

Watch the Keynote - https://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/keynote.aspx

Keynote Recap - https://redmondmag.com/articles/2011/10/03/microsoft-investing-in-sharepoint.aspx

Keynote Live Blog - https://www.sptechblog.com/2011/10/greetings-from-sharepoint-conference.html

Main SharePoint Conference site - https://www.mssharepointconference.com 

Good top ten recap - https://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=480