SharePoint conference news roundup

This week is the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas and the news has been coming out fast and furiously. Steve Ballmer delivered the keynote address [1] and talked about the increasing role of cloud computing in Microsoft's strategy and the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. Among the features in the new release will be a new ribbon interface to match Office 2007, deeper integration with Microsoft Office, richer APIs and much more.

The latest version of SharePoint will also support Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 making it easier for organizations to build accessible websites, which is especially important for externally facing websites.

In an interview with Network World [2] following the keynote, Ballmer admitted that the the Danger data loss incident last week that resulted in Sidekick users losing their data would make selling the cloud more difficult for Microsoft (as I wrote in a DaniWeb post yesterday called "Ballmer Gets That Sidekick Issue a Matter of Trust [3]"). While Microsoft claims that it has recovered much of the data, it still makes it more difficult for organizations who are nervous about putting content in the cloud to trust that Microsoft will protect their data as well as they can in-house.

SharePoint is designed to be a base package, however, and a lot of the functionality will continue to come from partnerships like EMC product introduced this week [4]. In addition, SpringCM introduced a new product that lets Spring content management users take advantage of the Spring services while using SharePoint as a content creation tool. Meanwhile MarkLogic introduced a PowerPoint 2007 connector on the heels of its SharePoint 2007 connector released earlier this year.

We've written here before [5] that SharePoint might not be the best at everything, but it does provide a base set of functionalities and using its partner ecosystem, it can let third parties fill in the missing pieces.

For more information:
- see the Microsoft press release [6]
- see the MarkLogic press release [7]
- see the SpringCM press release [8]

Related Articles:
SharePoint's hard to define, but you can't ignore Microsoft as an ECM player [5]
SharePoint director remains bloodied but unbowed [9]
Survey finds that SharePoint remains a file share for almost half of users [10]
Could SharePoint simply be 'good enough?' [10]
SharePoint still struggling to define itself [11]