SharePoint Connections KeyNote - Thomas Rizzo
We just heard the opening "KeyNote" session for the SharePoint portion of the DevConnections conference delivered by Tom Rizzo. Tom is the Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server at Microsoft.
He announced the replacement of SharePoint for search with: SharePoint Search Server 2008. These changes will also roll into the full version of MOSS in the middle of 2008. He demonstrated some of the capabilities of the new server and they were pretty incredible. The ability to manage and combine federated searches into a common search location was something I could see a lot of people using in their enterprise. There is a free version that has a single-server limit if you want to try it out. It promises easier installation, new administration, better performance and scalability and no document limits. There is also connectors for Documentum and FileNet
Tom made the case that companies could buy MOSS *just* for searching and it would be worth it. After seeing his demonstration I would have to agree! http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx
Tom talked about the launching of the new SharePoint site at Microsoft, SharePointPedia: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/Home.aspx
We asked Tom about some better tools for SharePoint development, deployment, etc. and he pointed us towards Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 (VSTO) Here's a preliminary look: http://blogs.msdn.com/nikhil/archive/2007/06/05/vsto-2008-beta-1-what-s-in-there.aspx We're eager to check this out.
All in all it was a very informative opening session.
-Ryan