The 2011 SharePoint Conference

The sessions that stood out for me were the following, here they are in no particular order:

• From Web Content Management to Customer Experience Management: How to Optimize External Web Site and Deliver a Search-Driven Experience
  Speakers: Stephen Powers and Leslie Owens both of whom are Analysts at Forrester
• Application Lifecycle Management: Automated builds and testing for SharePoint projects
  Speakers: Chris O’Brien (Independent Consultant) and Mike Morton (Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team)
• Security Design with Claims Based Authentication
  Speakers: Nathan Miller (MCS) and Israel Vega (Solution Architect with MCS)

The first one listed above even surprised me at first (I don’t typically like these) but the speakers from Forrester were exceptional at getting their point across about the “Search-Driven Experience” and why it is important.  Gone are the days of a structured/rigid experience, now-a-days people are getting to your website from various means (like Bing or Google) and you no longer control how they navigate through your site.

The second one should come as no surprise at all given that I am a Visual Studio ALM MVP and also dabble considerably in SharePoint Server.  This session interested me a great deal as I have implemented this exact scenario (Build, Deploy and Test) using Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.  Chris and Mike were great at delivering this session, I was very curious to find out how they implemented their automated builds and testing with SharePoint not using Lab Management.  After the session I asked Chris why he chose that particular method to implement his build, deploy and test scenario vs. Lab management.  We then proceeded to lunch at the ACC with some others, the SharePoint Conference never disappoints I always seem to meet a lot of interesting people year after year.  I can’t wait for Mandalay Bay next year!

The last session was of particular interest to me due to the fact that Claims-Based Authentication appears to be the right way to implement public facing sites.  I did attend a few other sessions on Claims Based Authentication but some of them were a bit depressing after the `People Search`demonstration…clearly a gap one needs to fill before going this route.
The greatest part of this session was the Facebook Claims Provider demonstration they implemented and a working `People Search`.  All-in-all a great session and I even sent and email immediately afterwards to Nathan Millar to ask if he could share those samples!

The Keynote

The part of the keynote I found most interesting was the Load Test and Fail-over demonstration by Richard Riley on stage of a SharePoint 2010 Farm and the SQL Server Denali CTP.  The hardware geek in me was drooling over the wicked hardware on stage that Microsoft had to demo the HA SharePoint configuration.

While the environment had a simulated load of 7500 concurrent users the network cable was pulled from one of the SQL Server Database Servers which failed over the entire SharePoint 2010 Farm (14TB of data) in 40 seconds or so.  This shows off the “Always On” feature in SQL “Denali”.  You can watch it here if you haven’t seen it.

The SharePoint Conference is over for another year, it is hard to believe it has been two (2) years since the last one and I am so looking forward to next years at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

Here are some links related to the Load Test and Content Database Sizes

• Scale Test Report for Very Large-Scale Document Repositories
• The SharePoint Content Database Data Size Limit
• SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits
• Managing Multi-Terabyte Content Databases with Microsoft SharePoint 2010