We are all home and hopefully unscathed from the SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas, NV. This past week was a whirlwind of seminars, vendors and after-hours parties. This conference officially started with a bang as Jared Spataro, Senior Director, SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft, and Jeff Teper, Corporate VP, Office Division, Microsoft, as they kicked off the keynote address. Together they brought the message of many of the new features that SharePoint 2013 brings to the future.
Here is a taste of some the new features that you can be looking forward to:
- Content Search Webpart: This webpart opens a wide range of new possibilities, but with great power must come great responsibility. This webpart has been created to display content that was crawled and added to the search index. You can use category pages when you want to aggregate content that meets certain criteria or parameters. For example, in an intranet scenario, all company events are maintained in a list that is shared as a catalog. A query is issued from the Content Search Web Part to return all items from the search index that are specified in the query. This may be the beginning of a new era of e-commerce abilities with SharePoint.
- Support for Design Tools: With the new release of SharePoint 2013 comes the ability to use tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver, Notepad++ , Microsoft Expression Web among many HTML editors to work on publishing portals. You will still have SharePoint Designer 2013 as you currently have in 2010.
- Device-specific Master Pages – You can now use device channels to brand specific masterpages to target different mobile devices. More to come on this in a future post.
There are many other new features that will be available to you in SharePoint 2013. Please stayed tuned for in-depth posts regarding each of the new features.
Speakers from all over the world came together to present over 200 seminars to IT Professionals, Developers and End-Users. The sessions ranged from Developing Apps for the SharePoint App Store to Javascript and HTML 5. Many of the presenters were in a race to create and find alternative ways to present their solutions as the Wi-Fi access continued to be limited throughout the conference. All in all, most presentations went off without a hitch and users walked away with a wealth of knowledge to implement in their own environments.
Each day after the exhibit hall would close, the 10,000+ attendees, presenters and vendors would hit the streets of Las Vegas for all that the city could offer. One of the major events was held Tuesday night at The Beach at Mandalay Bay with the start of the Bon Jovi and Kings of Suburbia concert followed by an amazing fireworks display. Several conference sponsors held private events through the city as well.
For those who attended the conference, the seminars were all recorded and are now available for download through your MySPC website. If you were unable to attend, be sure to check-in on several upcoming SharePoint Saturday and SPTechCon events coming to an area near you.