Jean-Paul Smit

Today was the second day of the 2-day conference. Today I had planned to see more of the back side of SharePoint 2010. After all I am an integration guy.

So I went to see a session about the Business Connectivity Services by Steve Fox. It was a good session which provided a good overview. In SharePoint 2007 it was only possible to read external data and view it in a list, but in SharePoint 2010 the full CRUD operations are supported. It is my expectation that this feature will be used extensively to perform operations on LOB systems. Also with my background in integration I see a lot of possibilities.

Next I attended Integrating workflows into backend systems using Data External Services, presented by Wouter van Vugt. This guy tries to talk twice the speed of sound and you really have to pay attention otherwise you’re lost, or at least that was my experience. I’m not all that into WF data external services and Wouter jumped from one topic to the other. The thing I missed was context and overview. For the more experienced attendees it was probably a meaningful session.

After the lunch I planned my last session. It was about Claims based identity in SharePoint 2010 by Spencer Harbar. This was also a somewhat disappointing session. He probably knows a whole lot about the topic, but he has difficulties presenting it. He talks monotonic, didn’t show any demo and was finished 25 minutes early. The things he discussed where general claims bases topics like the STS. He could have shown more SharePoint specific, in my opinion.

After the last session I rushed to the BTUG meeting, the Dutch BizTalk User Group meeting. The sessions there were very good, as always. It was great to see so many familiar faces and it was terrible I had to leave early, just in the middle of the session I actually came for. Too bad.

Tomorrow is my 3rd day, the developers deep dive. Let’s see what that will bring.