I spent last week in Seattle at the SharePoint 2008 Conference. As a opportunity for me to attend sessions it sucked but for a good reason; I spent almost the entire conference talking to customers, partners, analysts, competitors & the Microsoft SharePoint team - it was...what's the word? Illuminating is probably most appropriate followed closely by exhausting.

Let me pick some of my top observations - serious and humorous:

1. SharePoint: Solution or Platform? Before last week's conference I think that I viewed SharePoint as being a business solution or at least a broad set of capabilities. Admittedly, a solution that needed development work in order to solve a specific business requirement. Almost without exception the attendees at the conference viewed SharePoint as exclusively being a development platform. I am not saying that they don't roll out SharePoint almost out of the box to solve business problems but that's almost an aside. They see SharePoint as being a platform that gives the developer access to a plethora of integration points in to the user's working environment. Bear in mind that the audience was primarily IT not developers so this was not "I am a developer so everything is a platform" situation.
2. Business Opportunities Outside of Core SharePoint: Next year I am going to buy extra tickets for the conference. Would you believe that there were people lined up at the door who did not have tickets and were hoping somehow to get in on spec. I'm thinking next year they should have a parking lot for tailgating and people hawking tickets. Maybe they could have some up for auction and they could give the monies to charity. Seriously guys, you should do this...or maybe just get a bigger venue.
3. ECM or Data Center Management? I used a presentation at the conference that was based on my world renown and revered eight reference architectures; it was the first time that I had used this deck. I re-learned a lesson that I should have not had to re-learn - know your audience... Here's the thing, if you are a proponent of enterprise content management then my deck probably made sense but if you live exclusively in the world of SharePoint then you could not care less. That said, take 3 or 4 of the reference architectures and label them "Managing SharePoint Data Center Sprawl" and you'd have more attendees than that Gates chap had at the keynote! Better still, call it "Preventing the need to slow down your SharePoint deployments because off the liability and risk caused by silos in the data center" and you'd get Microsoft's blessing, (marketing might have something to say about the title though.)
4. SharePoint Might Just Catch On. I am pretty sensitive to things...ask anyone who works for me, Mr. Sensitive they call me. I'd have to say that this SharePoint nonsense might actually be successful. I heard a lot of people call the current 2007 version "raw" and I'd tend to agree but there are a  lot of compelling things that SharePoint brings to the table. Some of them still do not make sense to me, (portfolio management as a core capability to be added for example), but perhaps that's just because of where my attention is focused right now.
5. How Orange is Too Orange? If you attended the conference this is for you, otherwise it will not make sense. I sent my deck to EMC marketing for approval before submitting it and their feed back was "It is a bit orange." I guess that's better that them trying to change the actual content. Rather than addressing this directly I added something orange to each slide; I struggled to find 32 orange things to plaster on to the slides but being a consummate overachiever I managed. I'd like to think that no one left my session with less vitamin C than when they entered!
6. When in the USA, Only Expect One Person in the Audience to Understand a Father Ted Joke: Whether SharePoint is really an enterprise content management would indeed be an ecumenical matter - Thanks for laughing Mick!
7. Who reads This Drivel? People from Microsoft do...would you believe that they not only still talk to me, they actually treated me really nicely - they even bought me dinner one night. You'd think they'd know better.
8. The EMC Microsoft Practice are Excellent: As you know, I tend to take a fairly agnostic approach to the fact that I work for EMC and try not to sound like an extension of the EMC marketing machine; I am of course always 100% loyal to anyone who is paying me. That said, I cannot tell you how many people commented on how great these guys are - it turns out that EMC has over 400 certified Microsoft Professionals in the practice. It is without a sliver of self interest that I expound the skills of these people just 1 week before I start the process of getting them to provide massive amounts of resources to my projects free of charge. J
9. The Hilton Seattle. By far the worst Hilton I have stayed in ever...IMHO. Avoid it.

I've registered for Tech Ed but will probably not get a chance to re-do the presentation at that event but I'm looking forward to yet another geek-fest!