Well let's face it, it wasn't me..."post a Blog entry every day". I didn't exactly pull that one off but here are some random thoughts that I do have time to put to paper given that I have four hours to kill in Las Vegas airport. Just in case you care, I don't gamble or drink and I hate people so Las Vegas is about the last place on earth I'd like to be. It is a good job that the good Lord invented Minnesota otherwise I'd be in the actual last place that I want to be

For those of you who don't know me you'll be surprised to hear that I have an eidetic memory which means that I remember absolutely everything...unfortunately I also have A.D.D. which means that I only remember the things that I am thinking about rather than the things I was supposed to be remembering! Anyway, back on track, (for now), I ran through my memory banks and processed everything that was said to me during the conference and here are some interesting facts:

• 73% of the conversations started with either:
  • Are you the poor sap that got landed with the SharePoint integrations?
  • We need you to make SharePoint and Documentum work together...can you sort that out for us this week?
  • If you don't stop doing that I'll call security
• The most common words/expression used in the conversations were:
  • Portal
  • Ease of use
  • I will use this Taser if you don't leave me alone
  • Maverick, (not me, the deployment of SharePoint)
  • One client
  • Search

Focusing on the common words and expressions...there really was a pattern and a few things were validated in my mind. In no particular order:

• People know that they need SharePoint to work with their ECM system but they don't know exactly what that means.
• We joke about the fact that customers call us up and say "I need you to make SharePoint and Documentum work together", we tell them that we will need to sit down with them and better understand their requirements and they tell us, "I just told you them."
• Our customers are usually painfully clear about their requirements; why would they be acting without their normal clarity of thought? My theory is that they don't actually understand what SharePoint is being used for so they cannot clearly define the underlying ECM requirements. If they don't truly understand the role the SharePoint plays in their company then why would be expected to know how it interacts with something like an ECM system.
• The solutions that we all talk about are driven by the available technology...this seems like a good thing but it stifles innovation. We talk about creating Web parts, moving content from SharePoint to Documentum or creating shortcuts as if they were solutions - they are not, they are technologies. Erin, (The SharePoint Product Manager), and I spent some time discussing this after one of the product validation sessions and came to some really interesting conclusions...in fact I'd say we came up with a real humdinger of an idea, (wow, humdinger did not trigger the spell checker). I'd love to share it with you but it was too good...if you are a customer then you'll hear about it over time, I promise.
• Here is an extremely crude survey - from all the people that I spoke to at the conference less than half of them believe that IT are backing up their SharePoint sites. This is probably one of the most startling facts that I have ever published in my Blog. I'm throwing you a bone by burying it here to give you time to sort it out because in the near future I am going to poll my readers and see whether my estimate is close and then Blog about it. There were two overriding facts that I believe contribute to this:
  • IT know that the sites existed but do not have the capacity to back them all up, (or more correctly they did not have the capacity to back up the ones that they did know about.)
  • They did not know where the sites were and because of reason 1 they were unwilling to go looking for the sites...out of "site", out of mind...get it? (Maybe I should drink...)
• I think I am funny...but I'm not
  • That previous pun.
  • I had a slide that announced that I was about to reveal the product roadmap for the new generation of our SharePoint products. The next slide was an image of the "Blue Screen of Death" complete with animated flashing cursor. Most of the people in the room thought that this one was funny, (except the guys in the Microsoft shirts in the front row - sorry).
  • I did my presentation with someone from marketing, (I'll call him Martin Davids to retain his anonymity). "Martin" is from Canada so our Q&A slide had images of some pool cues and one of the Canadian Mounties - Cue and 'A', (the Canadians say 'A' at the end of every sentence-A.)
• If you put the word "SharePoint" in your session title you'll fill the room...even if it is Martin Davids and I speaking.
• There'll be a non-refundable cover charge and 8 drink minimum next year to cover costs.
• On a number of occasions customers compared the SharePoint deployment model to Microsoft Access rather than Lotus Notes which surprised me. They said that when Access came out they found that departments were deploying their own solutions based on Access without IT/Legal being aware. I'm not sure why this is but I suspect that some of them simply never used Notes because they were Microsoft shops so maybe Access was the closest comparison.
• SharePoint as a development platform came up very infrequently but that actually validates to me that the SharePoint community view SharePoint as a platform but for some reason, (the Microsoft marketing machine perhaps), the rest of the world see it as being a solution/application/panacea.

It was a great conference, absolutely exhausting, but really good. The compliance team did an extraordinary job as always and the SharePoint team really took advantage of the opportunity to spread the word and validate our plans. I'd like to thank all of the customers, partners and fellow Bloggers who took the time to chat...Laurence, thanks for not reporting what we really said over lunch, Marko, sorry we didn't touch base - I swear I really was on the phone each time I saw you, I wasn't faking it!

In closing, I'll like to directly quote a customer who was talking about his internal challenges with SharePoint, "...they think it is the Holy Grail but in reality it is just a collection of bits..."