In the morning, I had my session on Excel Services. For most attendees a new experience and I was able to go somewhat further than the typical mortgage calculator demo I am doing.

Next, I attended a session on the new Microsoft Access 2007 as a rich smart client for WSS v3. I told you yesterday that I was already impressed with the new Access. After this session, even more! Things I really like are moving an entire database to SharePoint, let it create lists and views and being able to work off-line with these lists. And next a very cool feature the collect data through email messages with InfoPath 2007 forms making up the body of the email, replies from everybody immediately dropped into a linked table with a SharePoint list, workflow kicked off,.. amazing integration options without a single line of code. That is going to be the power of the next version of SharePoint.

I also attended a session delivered by Bill English explaining the indexing and search architecture and concepts in MOSS 2007. I liked the explanation of the new improvements to the relevance ranking. I start to understand the excitement I saw back in Redmond about this. 

Major innovations to search in MOSS 2007 are to me:

  • improvements to the relevance ranking
  • more flexible and usable search scopes
  • no worries anymore on what to do with the index files (there is only one per shared service provider :))
  • search scopes not only defined based on content sources but also on managed properties
  • managed properties themselves
  • the search center and the customizability (although I don't like the fact that you cannot hook up your own custom Web part with the MOSS search-related Web parts)
  • the keyword syntax approach for executing a query via the object model (yes the QueryProvider has been 'deprecated')

Here are some links you might be interested in:

At the end of the day, I gave a bonus session titled 'Building an Internet site with SharePoint in 60 minutes'. Not that I have soo much free time here but I found that the CMS folks also needed a session on this conference :). Anyway it was fun and I hope you all enjoyed that. I promised some links:

  • here is a presentation that is available on MSDN used during the Ascend training
  • and here is the most comprehensive list of WCM-related resources from THE CMS guy Andrew

Now, back to work :)