SharePoint Conference NA – The photos and my takeaways

SharePoint returning to Vegas, would it work like the days of old? There is certainly something special about the SharePoint community and this conference had that tight knit community feel to it.

Vegas amazes me at the amount of people it seems to just be able to soak up without really skipping a beat, making it the perfect place for hosting a conference. There’s no transport required to venues and endless dining and entertainment options.

We had a really busy time on the OnePlace Solutions booth, a big thank you to everyone who stopped by to see what our latest products are capable of and keeping us busy. We had more quality conversations than we were expecting, and it’s great to hear peoples passion for SharePoint and Office 365 coming through in those conversations.

While there was a lot being announced at the conference, I was happiest to see metadata in SharePoint finally getting some love. I had thought that SharePoint had lost it’s way a little on the metadata front in recent years. Especially in the shift to modern UI for document libraries and lists. I believe it is the metadata that made SharePoint so valuable for building solutions on top of. So I was super excited to see the modern document library webpart receive a big overhaul in it’s support of metadata.

Lists also got a refresh and I think the ability to generate a list (and columns of the right type) by directly importing a spreadsheet is genius. I think is a fairly common work pattern for users to start playing with tabular data in Excel and at some point it becomes valuable to share – providing such a simple way of moving from Excel to SharePoint should drive adoption of SharePoint lists as the central shared location for this data and then provide a wealth options on what can be done with that data once it’s in SharePoint.

I was technically impressed (and surprised) by the augmented reality of SharePoint Spaces and the work that had been done to bring this to the masses. I think it appeals more to the content management space than the document management, file management, collaboration and business workflow process areas I typically work in.

Below is a quick video of my reaction after the keynote.