Uhhh.  If you haven't gotten the memo yet folks.  SharePoint is HOT!!!!

I've been to a few different conferences in the last couple years and it is very clear that interest in SharePoint is growing at a rapid pace.  Now that SharePoint has split off from the MS Office conference there is a pure focus at the MS SharePoint Conference 2008. 

Initial indications were compelling as the conference was sold out over a month in advance.  Then the hotels sold out.  Then upon arrival there were people literally hanging around outside hoping to get in.  One guy commented that if we all didn't have pre-registered RFID badges there probably would have been some serious ticket scalping going on!  It's not hard to see why.  I haven't been around this many smart cerebral type folks in a long time.  You can't help but learn something!

I grabbed a great session today on Planning for Scale and Capacity.  So much of what they had to say rang true.  Their "It Depends" answer to the inevitable "how many servers do I need" is something that I seem to have given to a lot of customers these days.  Fortunately, these guys have taken a lot of the guesswork out of capacity planning with their excellent Capacity Planning Tool. They did another demo of it today and I'm enamored by how easy it is to use!  It is wonderful to have such a powerful tool that takes into consideration so many variables!  Great work guys!

Another thing I'm excited about is the story around FAST search.  The message of where FAST slots into the mix is really shaping up.  It's clear that you have Search Express on smaller implementations, Enterprise Search on midrange to large implementations, and then there's FAST which can do the EXTREMELY large implementations with mind boggling scales of capacity and search response times.  I just don't see how any other portal product can complete with this holistic platform.  They've covered all the bases. SharePoint scales to the moon.  And if you have an EA with Microsoft, YOU ALREADY OWN SHAREPOINT!  Calling all CIOs...lets get to work pulling together all of that intellectual content you've got scattered around!  It just got even harder to come up with a reason not to!

Anyway, it's shaping up to be an amazing conference.  I have some friends doing some sweet sessions.  Darrin Bishop (my mentor from back in the 2003 days) is doing cool things with PowerShell and SharePoint administration these days and I'm looking forward to Todd Baginski's session on SSO.  Unfortunately, I missed his BDC session today but I heard it was excellent.

Oh yeah, and what a great perk Microsoft... Free Prometric testing for the "Configuring MOSS" and "Developing MOSS" tests!  I took a crack at the Configuring and knocked it out with flying colors so I'm officially an MCTS now!  I'm hoping to get a chance to take the "Developing MOSS" test tomorrow.

Also, I want to plug the session that I've been directly involved with!  Remember that whitepaper I mentioned in an earlier post?  Well, Paul Learning (MS), Andy Hopkins (MS), and I have been working on this scalability effort for the last couple months and Paul and Andy will be presenting on much of what will be in that whitepaper!  For any of you at the conference that happen to catch this blog from an aggregator somewhere, PLEASE don't bail on the conference early!  We're one of the last sessions on Thursday!  Come check out the SharePoint Scalability – Practical Application for the Enterprise session at 12:00pm!  It was a late entry and didn't make it into the schedule book.

Finally, thanks to Todd Baginski for talking us into waiting in line over 2 hours to get into the flight simulator at the Museum of Flight.  It was WELL WORTH THE WAIT!.  Paul and I had a blast flipping and rolling that thing like crazy.  I'm looking forward to game night tomorrow!  I've been away from home only 2 days now and in addition to missing the wife and kids, I'm also missing my daily dose of Guitar Hero!  I hope they have it tomorrow!

Good times.