One of the greatest BPOS features is the quarterly updates - this suggests a more contemporary approach to on-going software development pioneered by Google.  Part of the power of BPOS is the regular updates that deal with issues and add functionality to improve the overall user experience.  With SharePoint 2010 launching in 1st or 2nd Q 2010, BPOS won't be far off in completing its migration to the new 2010 feature set.  We will be watching this migration, version upgrade very carefully and documenting anything an everything we find about what an end user or service administrator might need to do prior to and after the upgrade.  There might be something as simple as modifying the master page to include a new Terms and Conditions Reference, or a change / update to your existing workflows.  At this point, we don't have all the details but the list is starting to form.  Look for something in the coming months. 

The SharePoint Conference Keynote was pretty good.  Tom Rizzo from the SharePoint Product Team at Microsoft kicked things off welcoming everyone to Las Vegas and telling a few quips about SharePoint and some tid bits of good news.  He then introduced Steve Balmer who spoke for about an hour or so.  Steve Balmer had some good insights into SharePoint. He told an anecdote about a childhood friend who is the CEO of a fourtune 50 company and doesn't want any social computing products within his IT organization.

Balmer also spoke to the ways in which customers can get SharePoint - the ecosystem is "on prem" or "cloud" and interestingly enough there was absolutely no mention of the "partner-hosted" offerings that have been buffering all their other "cloud" discussions.  Several hosting and SaaS companies are marquee sponsors of the conference.  Based on interviews on the exhibit floor there is concern.  Everyone is still trying to figure out how to work together.  Many web part and SharePoint-based ISV's are feeling locked out of the SharePoint Online offerings, even in BPOS-D and this is a huge customer satisfaction issue.  The bright side is that there is communication, although limited in scope and effectiveness, as to how ISV's should re-write their solutions, web parts, etc to be BPOS Standard and BPOS-D compliant.  Some ISV's are taking a run directly at that issue by partnering with SaaS providers to immediately offer their software in the Partner Hosted model.  At least four major web part development shops all reported that they had formed or were forming partnerships.  At least one development shop reported to be working on an EC2 offering where a customer could spin up a Windows image in the cloud and leverage Web Services to BPOS Standard or BPOS-D.  Back to the Keynote.

Tim Rizzo showed a demo of SharePoint Online (the next release) where you can upload a Solution File to deploy to your Site Collections hosted in the Microsoft Cloud (more on this later).  In that short demo it looked like the user he was uploading the Solution File with had a "My Site".  Hopefully that demo was based on SharePoint Online Standard - and we'll know this very soon.  The SharePoint 2010 functionality around social computing looks and from a terminology standpoint sounds just like Facebook - specifically this would be My Sites in 2010.  Friend Feeds on your My Site, Wall Posts asking for business relevant help, skill location across employee profiles, etc. 

They introduced PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint - which are awesome pivot tools.  They function nearly the same in the browser through SharePoint and on the client side on your desktop.  They showed 100,000,000+ rows being dynamically sorted in real time.  It was pretty awesome.  I am sure there are some folks who want that tool.

Tim Rizzo and Steve Balmer took some Q&A from the crowd and were asked a good question about MAC / Safari support in the education vertical which Balmer took and said there would be good support for Safari, but Internet Explorer will have a better experience in some regards (maybe with Office integration?).

Stay tuned, more later!

At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 at the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas Nevada USA learning about all the new and improved functionality of SharePoint Online and using Office Sky Drive and the Office Web Applications (which are the web based versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, OneNote, Visio, and Access).  There is a ton of new functionality coming down the pike for BPOS and BPOS-D users.  The obvious functionality will allow you to use the Microsoft Office desktop suite in the web browser.  The great news is that most of this functionality will be available in both Internet Explorer and other browsers such as FireFox and Safari.  We already understand the set of web services available for consumption in BPOS Standard and SharePoint Online Standard.  What's coming in the next rev is an even bigger set of functionality that will allow the addition of solution files through the web browser.  Stay tuned for more from the SharePoint Conference.