Allen Emerick, John Dandison, and I were at the 2009 SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas back in October. The entire conference was held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Here at the conference Microsoft unveiled a ton of details and training around the next SharePoint release, SharePoint 2010.
During the day we were in training sessions and at night there were different activities planned. Monday night was the customer appreciation reception at the Shark Reef. It was really cool to speak with other customers and to talk to some of the Microsoft employees involved with SharePoint.
Tuesday Allen spoke at a session on creating Extranets using SharePoint. Unfortunately Allen had to fly out after the session. In the afternoon I was able to participate in a small discussion group about the "Enterprise Requirements for SharePoint Infrastructure and Administration." There were only 10 of us chosen out of all of the attendees. That night John and I enjoyed 80’s night at the Mandalay Bay Beach. Here almost all 7500+ attendees were talking, eating, drinking, watching break dancers, and listening to Huey Lewis and the News.
Wednesday, Nick Swan from the SharePoint Pod Show interviewed John and I about what cool things we are doing at Skanska with SharePoint. You can listen to the podcast here: http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/archive/2009/12/09/spc-interviews-episode-39.aspx. We also visited some of the vendor booths and some more sessions. That night we went to the Enterprise Search reception and then ate dinner at Red, White, & Blue. We ended up having some good conversations with Raleigh local, Mike Gannotti, and someone I met last year, Keith Richie.
Thursday John and I mainly visited vendor booths before he had to go catch his flight. I also visited more sessions and talked with a lot more vendors that afternoon.
Even though the conference ended on thursday, I stayed until Monday. If you are interested in what I did those extra days, please see my wife’s blog post about it. http://erica.thelineberrys.com/2009/10/vwhat-happens-in-vegas-shows-up-on-facebook/
SharePoint and Alfresco are bound together by a cmmoon factor both are ECMs Enterprise Content Management systems. Emphasis on Enterprise. But another market SharePoint has been positioning itself strongly for is the SMB market. This creates room for content management systems for SMBs which position themselves as an alternative to SharePoint. The emphasis on this market is not on backend robustness, but solutions that offer feature robustness and ease of setup, while cloaking the backend all SMB needs. You will notice that this niche is getting hotter by the day. Google is positioning itself in its niche with (as part of its overall strategy to give MS a run for tis money), and smaller players Like have also found a firm foothold by virtue of having robust solutions and being an early mover.