The SharePoint Asia Pacific Conference in Sydney.

I Just attended the keynote speech given by Derek Burney, Mike Fitzmaurice and Ryan Duguid. Derek is the GM of the SharePoint Platform and Tools group responsible for the development of the Windows SharePoint Services platform and its associated development tools. Mike Fitzmaurice is the Technical Product Manager responsible for promoting application development on Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Ryan works at Microsoft New Zealand as a Technical specialist.

Highlights of the keynote for me

• Analysts Gartner, Forrester and AMR research all say that “SharePoint is a serious platform”
• Vibrant partner community who deliver solutions on top of SharePoint
• E-week report “SharePoint Server 2007 Is an (Able) Jack of All Trades“
• Community of experts and developers
• Visual Studio tools integration

Ryan highlighted an employee provisioning application built with SharePoint. The most common request that I typically get asked by IT is to automate the process of a new employee joining the organisation. The demo highlighted how the HR department can request a new employee to be setup which automates the provisioning of a login and email as well as start of a series of workflow and tasks. Everything can be viewed via reports as well as the workflow status for a given task. This alone shows the benefits of using SharePoint beyond its standard functionality.

Some photos available on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/spcapac/

Another highlight was to see two New Zealand customer logos among all the “BIG” customer logos. CAA and Ministry of Transport both from New Zealand.