Microsoft held their second SharePoint Conference in Seattle last week. By all accounts the turnout was well beyond Microsoft's expectations and certainly reinforced the fact that SharePoint usage and deployments have exploded. With more than 3800 attendees, virtually every company time, role and market was in attendance.

The volume of attendees demonstrated that the recent announcement about SharePoint breaking the $1bn sales mark with more than 100 million licenses is real. While the sales figure isn’t the biggest amount for a Microsoft server product – both SQL Server and Exchange have larger revenue streams – the news here is rather that SharePoint is the first non-core server product to reach this level and do it faster than either of its database or messaging siblings. Also keep in mind that half of the product is given away for free – you can download, install and use the basic collaborative features for nothing (assuming you have a Windows Server license).

So what’s with the title of this blog entry? Well, the folks in Redmond also made some pretty big announcements, repeated some previous behaviors, and took a page from a search giant’s playbook (sort of).

First, let’s talk about something old: SharePoint’s cross browser support. Certain executives at Microsoft continue to maintain that browsers like Safari and Firefox are relatively new and do not hold enough marketshare to devote significant development resources to support. While SharePoint 2007 is better than its predecessors, both browsers remain“tier 2.” This means that there are significant pieces of the SharePoint interface that just don’t work well, particularly around rich text editing. Here the Microsoft product team points you to Telerik and their free replacements for certain content creation components for Blogs, Wikis and for other SharePoint fields. Product and program managers within the SharePoint team told me that browser support is a priority for the next release of SharePoint (Office 14 timeframe), but there wasn’t enough time/resources for this round. Again, something old.

What’s new (kind of) is Microsoft’s “cloud” strategy for SharePoint and Exchange. Microsoft seems to be marching headlong into the managed services and, dare I say, SaaS arena. What was previously an experiment with large customers – more than 5000 seats – is now being offered to smaller enterprises, including single sign-on across both services. Note however, that hosted customers cannot make substantial customizations in this environment, although Microsoft says that they’re working on support for this (no timing released though).

As Microsoft clearly cannot offer true enterprise-wide search in SharePoint, borrowing from the FAST acquisition could help to extend this element of SharePoint. The FAST folks were on hand to demonstrate integration with SharePoint and, in what seemed an effort to also pitch Silverlight, showed very slick Silverlight Web Parts for displaying FAST search results inside of SharePoint. Unfortunately, the FAST stuff remains interesting demoware that won’t be available for some time. What was more disappointing though was the FAST sessions seemed to be more marketing pitch for FAST and not so much about how their technology was going to play with the existing Microsoft tools. As Enterprise Search Report readers know, FAST is a very complex and expensive tool that wasn't built on Microsoft technologies.

Finally we come to something blue. Frankly, this has more to do with the standard look and feel – the very SharePoint-blue that permeates the interface. While that hasn't changed, the conference hosted at least two design-centric sessions around “rebranding” SharePoint to match customer corporate identities. While this information wasn’t truly new, Heather Solomon (the speaker), presented some good practical material related to “how” one could make SharePoint look “not like SharePoint.” Of course, behaving not like SharePoint is entirely another matter, and grist for another entry...