Kurt DelBene is Microsoft’s Senior Corporate Vice President for the Office Business Platform business, which includes Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. His keynote speech followed Bill Gates’ at the recent SharePoint Conference (SPC 2008). Mr. DelBene emphasized two main areas in his keynote: customer evidence, and Microsoft’s listening to partners and customers in developing tools to help customers deploy SharePoint technologies more easily.
There were more than 20 customer-led sessions at SPC 2008 and Mr. DelBene presented an overview of many of the “headliners” using SharePoint technologies to solve “real world” problems:
- EasyJet – web content management
- Viacom – intranet/extranet
- General Mills – multilingual content
- Kroger – integration with commerce applications
- Starbucks – an employee portal serving over 24,000 employees
- Accenture – using MySites and search to find expertise
- Ford – using blogs and web 2.0 technologies to foster collaboration (more on this session, which I was able to attend, in a future post)
Mr. DelBene also stepped through many investments by Microsoft to assist customers in more easily deploying, managing, and using SharePoint:
- Skilled and available Microsoft and partner consultants
- Faster access to deeper support resources
- Gear Up Program for SharePoint (a toolkit for "[helping] IT professionals and business managers find timely resources and guidance through phases of a typical SharePoint Server 2007 deployment cycle)
- SharePoint Deployment Planning Services program (packaged consulting services you can purchase with your Enterprise Agreement or Software Assurance services allowance)
- SharePoint Solution Accelerators, tools for external collaboration, monitoring, cross-site configuration, and capacity planning (this last one was demoed, to a nice reception from the audience)
Given the timing of the release of some of these tools (the weeks just prior to SPC), I can envision SharePoint product team members putting in long hours to get these built and posted on the SharePoint Product Team Blog or CodePlex in time for the SPC keynotes.
Accordingly, our firm’s SharePoint practice team members will take some time to work with and test these products so we can help our customers assess when and how they are best used. It looks like a rich set of tools to help partners and customers take SharePoint to the next level.
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