PDC2008 - Report #1

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I'v ebeen attending PDC2008 this week and have been having a good time.  It's so much fun to talk with SharePoint MVPs, other Product Group folks from throughout Microsoft, and SharePoint consultants and SharePoint ISV Partners about the announcements this week and the new opportunities that these technologies will provide.

I've been experimenting with Twitter this week, and for those of you who sat through my Twit-storm on Monday and Tuesday during the keynote sessions, you'd recognize that I'm still learning.  My twitter id is "owenallen".  If you sign up at twitter.com and follow me, you can help me learn when it's appropriate to use Twitter and when it's not.    I think that it has it's appropriate usage.  The way that I think it starts being useful is that one can think of it in the same vein as Instant Messaging (IM).  The difference is that the twitter protocol is device and platform agnostic.  This means that you can leverage it on any of you r computing devices and have roughly the same experience.  Mobile device, home computers, office computers, temporary computers, etc.  It's a good example of a cloud-based service.  For a while, I was only using the SMS-mode with Twitter, until some friends turned me on to TinyTwitter, a Twittter client for my mobile phone.  I'mnot sold on it yet (it seems to crash frequently on my phone), but I'm going to try it.

One of my favorite announcements of PDC is the Microsoft Federation Gateway and the Microsoft Services Connector, which allows (and I may not be saying this right) users to logon to web services that support LiveID authentication using their corporate identity.  This provides for scenarios where corporations can leverage cloud services without needing to create a new set of user identities and permissions.  That is one of the large hurdles today, and mapping out a clear way to overcome that is something that organizations can start working with now.

One Favorite speaker answer...  "Now, there are some strange things that happen when you do that, but it basically works."

Props to Roy's restaurant for their Molten Chocolate Dessert.  M-m-m-m good.