Day 3! The whole reason I am at the SharePoint Conference this year is because I am helping our client present their SharePoint case study in one of today’s sessions.
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.
