Jul 14
WPC Day 1 Summary and Thoughts
Mark Becker
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This has been a very exciting conference for me (and the approximately 9000 others) because we are in a “wave” year! In fact, they had a cool video of a surfer getting towed behind a wave runner to catch a tsunami size wave – that was a metaphor for the impact of the amount of new releases coming from MS this year.
Of course most of the limelight is on Windows 7 – lots of numbers and stats from the usual suspects – aka IDC:
- $320 billion in HW, Software opportunity
- 177 million will ship by 2010
- 246 million Windows 7 capable PCs today
- 59% of Enterprises expected to migrate within 3 years
And, BTW Gartner says Windows 7 is Enterprise Ready and will not need SP1 to adopt.
Ok, so moving on….Office 2010 is pretty nice too. This is the first we have seen any demos or heard any talk, so of course we were wowed.
Some things of note.
- The ribbon is now in Outlook and SharePoint. It looked very functional for both.
- Co-authoring is available for most of the products – meaning multiple people can edit the same document, essentially checking out a paragraph at a time. VERY POWERFUL!
- SharePoint now has Access Publishing, Word Publishing, Visio Publishing and PowerPoint Publishing.
But wait – there’s more!
The PowerPoint publishing demo was very powerful. When they were done with the slide deck, they published it and sent out a Live Meeting invite, and proceeded to show slides being rendered from web browsers for everyone including a Windows Mobile device using Live Meeting. And, yes, even an iPhone will be able to render this. Imagine the possibilities. You can be on the road and still be part of a Live Meeting presentation and see the slides!
Not much talk about the Microsoft Vision, or the year in review, the numbers, etc. on day one. All in all we attended some great sessions and I look forward to more.
Stay tuned….