Office System Developer Conference 2008

Written on February 13, 2008 by Bryan

I had planned on live blogging much of the event on here, but it ended up seeming silly to do so. My colleagues and I did some live blogging of the sessions we went to and some of the keynotes on our company blog, but I did want to at least summarize some of the highlights here.

We arrived Sunday for a pre-conference session that I was frankly underwhelmed by. The one I had signed up for was not what I expected so I instead joined the session regarding the BizTalk Adapter Pack, which was actually quite compelling but not really directly related to SharePoint. Still, since I’ve had a minimal amount of experience with BizTalk, it was nice to get an overview of this stuff and we may find ourselves using it in the future.

The next day opened with Bill Gates’s keynote which I did write a post about as it was one of the more exciting events, at least for me. After that, I went to about five sessions over the next two days before we had to leave early and head home. Of the five, there were two that were absolutely phenomenal.

The first session I attended was called “SharePoint BDC Customization” and it was given by Nick Swan, Director at Lightning Tools Ltd., the makers of BDC Meta Man. This presentation was so good that I’ve had to add his blog to my SharePoint feeds. The Business Data Catalog has got to be one of the most powerful features of SharePoint, allowing you to connect to external data services and use SharePoint to expose the data in lists and web parts. I had always considered the BDC a read-only mechanism as Microsoft touts it to be, but Nick showed us that it can be configured for write backs as well.

After the presentation, I went up and talked to Nick about database permissions and authentication aside from managing the permissions as part of the Shared Server Administration configuration screens. This was one thing I know we are concerned about as far as using it at work. He said that at least for SQL Server there are a couple of different ways to handle this. One way is PassThrough (which sounds like it will work well with kerberos) using the username that is logged into SharePoint. The other was RevertToSelf which I didn’t understand entirely but it sounds like it’s using the App Pool user. I guess there are a couple more, and unfortunately none of them are too well documented it sounds like. I’m also not sure how this would work with, say, Oracle. Nick said he is writing a book which goes into detail about this stuff but it may not be out until July. However he said I could always drop him an email and check his blog. You can see his presentation slides here.

The final session I went to was also fantastic. It was regarding the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1 (VSeWSS 1.1). The release was announced at the conference and details posted here. Chris Johnson and Alexander Malek from Microsoft gave this presentation and posted the demo on their blog. I got so excited about these extensions, which make developing SharePoint solutions is Visual Studio so much easier, that I couldn’t wait to come and try them out. The WSP editor in particular is just incredibly useful.

The keynotes on the second day were about Office Live and Office Communications Server. Office Live is kind of neat, but it doesn’t provide much to a large enterprise at this point. OCS on the other hand looks really neat. We just recently got IM at our company so we are a couple years away at least from implementing an entire OCS solution, but if we can get there it sure will be cool. Integrating our phone habits into our general daily use of Outlook and IM is really game changing I think.

The last thing to mention is that we came across a great workflow product at the exhibits by Nintex. We are definitely going to look into using this product as an alternative to giving our business users access to use SharePoint Designer as this alternative is all browser based.

This technology just continues to amaze and challenge me. I’m really looking forward to going to the SharePoint conference in March. Stay tuned.

Posted in Conferences