In my new role as CTO of Razorfish one of our first big events is the technology summit currently planned for the first week in February 2010. Publicis is clearly excited, as are we, to bring out deep technology skills to the large client base at a company the size of Publicis. Change is always change and very exciting. Below are some of the thoughts on the technology aspects of the acquisition coming out in the press and from Publicis’s executives.

Here’s what Harley Manning from Forrester has had to say..

The firm has much stronger design capabilities, both for user experience and what we call “brand image”. Plus – and this is just my opinion because we did not evaluate them on this – it[Razorfish] has stronger technology capabilities as well.
The latter is important because there are some agencies out there with very strong tech chops, including IBM Interactive and Sapient. And it will become even more important as interactive moves to high function multi-touch mobile devices, or even stationary multi-touch devices like the way cool Coke vending machine Sapient displayed at Forrester’s recent Customer Experience Forum. Because ultimately, a great design has to actually work in order to deliver a great customer experience.

Brandweek captured some quotes from David Kenney

We got it at good terms,” said David Kenny, managing director of VivaKi, Publicis’ digital unit. They bring much more technology. I think that’s important. Their clients think very highly of them in terms of being able to technologically deliver, and that’s stronger than anything we have, including Digitas.”

In an interview with paidContent, Kenny pointed to Razorfish’s technology as well as its extensive global reach as key reasons behind the merge.

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• Is Cloud Computing the Hotel California of Tech? (tech.slashdot.org)

I scheduled some lightweight sessions in the morning, starting with the fun Building Sharepoint Mashups With SharePoint Designer, Bing Maps and REST Services.  This session was really pretty straight forward.  Using a data view web part to retrieve data from an MSN and Twitter RSS and/or REST feeds and then using XSLT to display maps mashup data (Google or Bing).

Before lunch, I went to Best Practices for Implementing Multi-Lingual Solutions on SharePoint 2010 to see what new things has 2010 in store for Variations.  While there are big changes in store for multi-lingual solutions, they are more on the admin/UI side.  The biggest improvement is the performance gains in building the Heirarchy Creation as timer jobs.  From a UI perspective, the chrome is now also localized based on User preferred language selectable from all the language packs installed.  And as much as I shake my head when I hear this from people, SharePoint 2010 DOES NOT TRANSLATE YOUR SITE CONTENT AUTOMAGICALLY!

I met my client for lunch and we proceeded as a group to Breaker E - our session room.  We presented “Kraft: Migration of Consumer Facing Websites to SharePoint” to a roomful of people and a few came up for questions, comments and leads after the session.  We consider it a success!  That was of course the highlight of my day and everything else was just blah after that point ;p  If you missed it, or are interested in watching the video of the presentation, a copy of the deck and a video of the presentation is up and available on the SharePoint Conference site.  You would need to login with your Windows Live ID.

I spent the afternoon going to Developing Social Applications with SharePoint 2010; and Customizing the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Deployment Process. In 2010, comments, ratings, my network, RSS feeds all come out of the box.  The social features available in SharePoint 2010 are ok but not good enough yet, IMO.  This is one area where I think the focus is still more in ECM implementations rather than the Internet.  The Manager/Employee methapor just will not work in the real world.  And though, I was told by the Product team that it could be implemented in an Internet scenario, as shown in their Adventureworks demo - I will have to form that opinion once I’ve seen their Adventureworks demo site.  Deployment has indeed been made simpler in VS2010 by being able to compile and deploy from VS2010 to a local SharePoint instance.  But for deploying between environments, and betwen farms - WSPs are still the best way to go.

This evening’s event is Ask The Expert and SharePoint Idol, a Rock Band competition.  I thought for a sec about joining a team but changed my mind.  I had fun watching them though.

For the 9am slot, I had to choose between Advanced Web Part Development in VS 2010 and Introduction to Service Applications and Topology.  The architect won over the developer so I went to the Service Applications session. Essentially, 2010 SSP (Shared Service Providers) is replaced by the new Service Applications architecture. You build service applications that can live in a separate Application Server, and you call it from clients, in this case a SharePoint web front end via proxies.  I’m not sure if this is a correct simile, but I kinda liken it to old DCOM architecture. This makes it easier for organizations (and frankly, ISVs) to build Service Applications that can be deployed once and then used in multiple SharePoint web apps, and more, multiple SharePoint farms.

There’s a follow-up session to this about Scaling SharePoint 2010 Topologies for Your Organization, but I skipped that in favor of Overview of SharePoint 2010 Online. SharePoint Online is another product in Microsoft’s “Software as a Service” offerings.  It is essentially a service where Microsoft hosts and manages SharePoint for your organization.  This is part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which also includes Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, Office Communications Online, Dynamics CRM Online. It is good for small or medium size business but can also be considered for the enterprise in some special cases.  The important thing to note is that this does not have to be an all-or-nothing decision.  SharePoint online is supposed to complement/extend your on premises infrastructure, not necessarily replace it.

In the afternoon, I agonized over Developing SharePoint 2010 Applications with the Client Object Model, Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SharePoint but ended up going to Claims Based Identity in SharePoint 2010.  The client object model was really getting a lot of good tweets during and after the session and I see a lot of opportunities there for us to pull SharePoint information via client calls, i.e., Javascript or Silverlight.  The virtualization session focused on Hyper-V so I didn’t feel too bad about missing it. In the Claims Based Identity session, Microsoft introduced their new Identity Framework and explained how it works.  This essentially works like Kerberos where essentially SAML tokens are created.  The good news is that it supports AD, LDAP, SAML.  The bad news is that it doesn’t support OpenID and other standard internet auth schemes/standards… yet.

I wanted to know more about composites and the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) so I went to Integrating Customer Data with SharePoint Composites, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and Silverlight.  BCS is one other new thing with 2010 that is interesting.  Allowing SharePoint to create External Content Type that can pull data from external LOB data opens up a lot of possibilities, but most of the demos I’ve seen so far only connects to 1 table.  In the real world, we would be connecting to a more complex table, in a lot of cases - pulling heirarchical data and I wanted to see how this works - more importantly, will it support CRUDQ features.  This session finally demo’d how to connect using a LINQ data source.  Didn’t see the CRUDQ part though, because the demo was read-only data.

For the last session of the day, I chose between Securing SharePoint 2010 for Internet Deployments (400) and SharePoint 2010 Development Best Practices (300).  So of course, I chose the geekier session since security is a hot topic on public facing sites.  However, this is probably one of the more disappointing sessions for me as this was really more targeted towards SP IT Pros than developers.  It is more about hardening your servers and protecting your network.  All these considerations even come default already in Windows 2008.  I probably would have enjoyed the best practices session better even though I was afraid they will be filled with “duh” moments.  I have to check that deck out though, it produced some funny tweets.

Day 2 is also the night of the Conference Party.  This year, the theme is 80’s night at The Beach (Mandalay Bay) with Huey Lewis and the News providing music and entertainment.  Too bad I missed it.

Registration and Exhibit Hall

This year’s conference is SOLD OUT. Compared to last years 3,800 attendees, this year’s 7,400 attendance is a testament to how big SharePoint has been adopted in the enterprise. Registration was pretty well organized and the badges are smart cards that are being scanned (optionally) by vendors for mailing list subscriptions and contests; and are also scanned by event managers for session attendance. Most of the vendors I saw in the Exhibit Hall are from Document Management Services - scanning, annotating, encrypting, converting, etc. And then there are the normal partner vendors: ISVs, SIs, Training, Data Recovery, Content Migration and Professional Services. Having said that - the give aways were a bit lame

Keynotes

There were 2 keynotes scheduled on day one, which lasted the whole morning. You would think that it wasn’t smart to have 7,400 attendees to sit still for almost 3 hours but Kudos to the presentation team, they pulled it off. Steve Ballmer did his FIRST SharePoint Conference keynote, one of the last few things Bill used to do that he hasn’t done yet. Tony Rizzo and the others did a great job on the demos doing enough to whet the appetite of all the geeks (like me) in the room. Here are the items that “struck” me during the keynotes. I am hoping to attend some of the sessions that show these in action.

• There’s a HUGE emphasis on SharePoint and Internet facing sites. So much so that MS has renamed their products and services to emphasize this. Expect licensing prices to reflect this change
  • Intranet Products: MS Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (formerly known as WSS), MS SharePoint Server 2010, MS Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
  • Internet Products: MS SharePoint Server 2010 For Internet Sites (STD, ENT editions) and MS Fast Search Server 2010 for Interet Business
• Oh yeah - Steve Ballmer features Kraftfoods.com on his keynote - Nice! I wonder if this will drive attendance on our session (Wednesday, 10/21 @ 1:15 pm)
• SharePoint 2010 goes on public beta in November - don’t forget to download
• SharePoint Online (SharePoint in the Cloud)
• SharePoint Workspaces (Groove Makeover)
• SharePoint Composites - I need to know more about this.  Interesting.
• Developer tool integration in VS 2010. One-Click build, deploy and debug >> AWESOME!
• Powershell Scripting - say goodbye to STSADM
• New External Content Type / BCS (formerly BDC) - opens up possibilities with integration to backend systems. I’m very excited about this
• SharePoint Service Applications - say goodbye to SSP
• Improved List Performance and Caching - taxonomy navigation (tags and labels)
• New and Improved Central and Site Admin UI - it’s AJAX yo!
• Built in Spell Checker - it’s the little things…
• Our PLDs and PLAs will like the improved support on standards specially WCAG
• Some Social Computing features out of the box - ratings, notes/comments, blogs, wall (My Network)
• VS 2010, SharePoint 2010 running on Windows 7 - 64 bit mobile development machine. yay!

Steve made a point by saying he didn’t think there’s any software out there that competes directly with SharePoint. Jeff Teper implies the same when he compares SharePoint to a Swiss Army Knife. Both videos are available online for viewing at the SPC09 website.

The list just goes on and on! There are way too many things to get excited about in 2010. I am hoping to get into the details of a lot of these in the upcoming sessions.

Day 1 Sessions

For the breakout sessions on day 1, I selected a couple of SharePoint overview topics.  One was SharePoint 2010 Overview and What’s New and more specifically for developers, Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developent Tools overview.  These sessions give me enough information on the overall features available so I can make a more informed selection in the coming days.

It’s nice to see Amazon moving into the CDN space with their Cloudfront offering, it seems like the CDN market can definitely use some fresh look at the challenge. It looks like it builds off your usage of Amazon S3 but with an accelerator finding the closest cache server to deliver your content. With this approach it doesn’t seem like a great fit as a CDN for any architecture. The chart on the right is an interesting comparison.

I’ve been intrigued over the last couple of years with Coral Caching. Peer to peer open source caching seems like it’s ripe with opportunity, wouldn’t it be cool if my mediacenter pc, apple tv and other laptops that sit at home idle during the day could be leveraged to help offload servers. I guess it’s a balance of saving power and sleeping or turning off the box vs. using less server power.

• Cost, cloud services are drastically less expensive than tradition hosting options, so the marketer can do more and innovate more with their money. Cloud services enable some basic things such as faster time to market, so faster results because we can build solutions in less time and not have to wait for an technology team to allocate servers and setup physical devices.

• Faster scalability to better keep up with the peaks and valleys of marketing campaigns and user traffic. In the old days we would have to prepare for an ad, email, keyword, or offline-online campaign and get servers ready on standby. With cloud services we can scale on demand with a lower cost and faster timeline. That’s because we aren’t limited by physical servers

• Strategically, social services are enabled through cloud computing, new offerings like Facebook connect, Twitter/delicious/reddit/digg/etc. apis, or even Youtube embed capabilities are all cloud services that enable you to drive traffic to your site without having to build your own social network. Facebook connect is a cloud service that enables the portable social graph bringing users to your property. One user post back to a user’s Facebook wall results in three more users accessing your site. So not only do you get exposure, but you save on Google keyword buysJ. In the old days, 3 years ago, we tried to build social networks on sites like flip.com and other properties, now we tie into the cloud service and get the same functionality in a fraction of time .

*lastly, there’s a word of caution around cloud services. Make sure you have some sort of redundancy, i.e. multiple services to achieve the same goal. We worked with Billboard on the latest release of their site which is a great example. See the red arrow as good example, if Facebook goes away, we are still sharing with other services. Other questions arise around redundancy for infrastructure cloud providers. The cloud computing manifesto is at least acknowledging the need for redundancy, but how to get the providers to do it.

Just a couple of weeks after Amazon’s announcement of their private cloud offering it looks like Microsoft is starting to open discussions in that direction. What’s interesting about Microsoft’s discussion is that are coming at it from two directions. They are a provider to the data centers, hosting providers and enterprises building these offerings as well as a provider directly to the consumer.

Google announced a new language called Noop today.  It looks pretty interesting, building on the power of spring and most notably for them, building dependency injection right into the laungage. Here’s some of the highlights. As we look across the projects we are working on it’s clear how important Spring has become to our architectures. It’s nice to see a more formal recognition. It’s always neat to see the impact of ’side projects’ at Google.

• Dependency injection built into the language
• Testability - a seam between every pair of classes
• Immutability
• Syntax geared entirely towards readable code
• Executable documentation that’s never out-of-date
• Properties, strong typing, and sensible modern standard library

I did find Vivek’s assertion here, hard to believe,

“Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5 million a year. But by turning to a cloud computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.”

but not knowing all the details it might real. Six months down to one day, sounds too much like pixie dust to me!