SP Conference

I've been attending the MS SharePoint Conference (Bellevue, WA) this week and having a good time.  it's great to re-connect with peers from around the world and I have a number of customers attending so it's good to speak SharePoint with them, of course!

Part of my cost of attendance is to help out proctoring at the Hands-on lab section of the conference.  Bob German (gratuitous name-drop) is serving penance along with us tonight.  I'm doing that tonight while all of the sane attendees are attending the attendee party in Seattle.  There are about 184 machines here available for the 9 people who are running the labs.

However, one of the downsides ;-) of attending a conference locally is that sometimes a high priority customer visit needs to be made.  I spent time this morning with a great customer talking about integrating MOSS 2007 and Commerce Server 2007.  It's going to be fun to put together web sites that are built on ASP.NET v2.0 and that surface MOSS and CS content side-by-side in their own web parts / field controls, and that are all leveraging the same page architecture and the same ASP.NET master pages.

A couple of the sessions today have focused on the technical bits behind the new SharePoint Enterprise Search technology, and those have been very interesting.  We had the MSFT IT department (MSFT's first and best customer?) talk about their experiences with implementing SharePoint search at the enterprise level to index and support Microsoft's worldwide enterprise.  Great things are happening with SharePoint Enterprise Search.