Last Friday I returned from the Office Developer Conference in San Jose, California. That was an exciting week with lots of good content and nice people, meat and beer. It started off on Sunday with the pre-conference session on Office Live Small Business. The second version of the Office Live services was just released and we had a 6 hour session on how to customize and develop for this environment. I completely missed the first release of these services, so it was the time I had a look. I was quite impressed with what I saw in that session. They have a new business model also, where the basic version is free, and you can add more "applications" if you want. For a free service, it contains a whole lot of features, like a web design tool, contacts manager, a collaboration workspace and e-mail. It is all built on top of WSS 3.0 and I think it is a perfect example of the power of the WSS platform.
The next day started with the keynote by Bill Gates. He talked about the past, present and future of Office. In this keynote, the new version of Office Live Small Business was officially announced. Besides the Client products and the Server products, the Services is the 3rd pillar in the Office family. Currently the smallest, but one that is growing fast! An important part of Office development in the next few years will be focused on OBA's. OBA was the buzzword at the ODC (I didn't count the slides I saw it on and the times I heard the word). An OBA is an Office Business Application. This is not something technical, but a general name for a specific type of application. In one of the breakout session, Scot Hillier talked in detail about these applications. One of the most important aspects of an OBA is that it integrates structured LOB data into an Office application (can be anything, Word, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint). They have defined 7 types of OBA applications, and these 7 patterns really help you start thinking about seeing these OBA's in your organizations. At least if you haven't heard about OBA before, like I did before going to the ODC. 
If you want to learn more about these OBA (have I said the word enough now??) applications, this book is a good start. And probably you think, "hey I already built 3 OBAs'". An example of an OBA they showed in the keynote is the QuickShip application bij FedEx.Good integration in Outlook for sending packets and in Word for printing your documents directly in a FedEx shop. It also contains a set of webservices which were integrated in the demo of Office Live Small Business. Nice!
In the keynote the also showed the video "The last full day of Bill Gates at Microsoft". If you haven't seen it before, go see it!
The second keynote on Tuesday was another keynote that inspired me. It was a very good presentation with very good demo's about Unified Communications. The keynote was done by Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President of the UC group. He talked about why Microsoft is working on Unified Communications and had 2 very cool demos. Both showed clearly that apart from setting up the communication the task of these technologies is to also pass the context of the conversation. The new OCS API's allow you to build these things into your applications easily. These API's will be used to build applications in one of these 3 pillars:
- contextual collaboration
- enhanced presence in business process communications (get rid of human latency in processes)
- click to communicate (anywhere information access)
After the demos we got a live coding demo (in Visual Studio 2008) of a workflow that integrates these technologies. This is something they are currently working on. A set of workflow activities that you can use to UC enable your workflows. His comments on how easy this was: "apparently that is how they do development these days", hahaha. If you want to know more about UC and OCS, the weblog of my colleague Joachim Farla is a good starting point.
In the breakdown sessions I focused mainly on learning more about OBAs and UC. I learned about architecture of OBAs, how to integrate WPF and WCM. How to use the OpenXML SDK and about OBA user experience patterns. In the UC sessions the technical details of the keynote demos were revealed.
I also did a session on Exchange webservices by David Sterling, which was very good. He talked about the new webservices in Exchange 2007, the new delegation options and how you can use these webservices to build cool things. We spent 80% of the time in the debugger watching code, but it was very interesting. And of course I did a SharePoint session :-). This was given by Andrew Connell and he talked about building high performance solutions on MOSS. Amazing how you can still learn things about the product I have worked with for nearly 2 years now. Very good tips and tricks that are important if you are building websites in MOSS. Go see his speakers page for more details and the slides.
The last session I did was an unconference session by the IWKid. In 30 minutes he showed a number of things he likes about SharePoint as a developer and that are underrated:
- RPC -> WSSRPC and FPRPC
- Powershell and SharePoint
- Alternative usages for the Content Editor WebPart
- Data Form WebPart, action buttons and workflows
You can find the slides here.
And that was my wrapup of what made my week at the ODC. Of course there were more sessions (some with beer), there was the party, the exhibit hall in which I had some interesting conversations. I enjoyed it very much and if you are developing for any of the Office products (including SharePoint), this conference is a good source for new ideas and content for you to consider for next year. I now have to learn how to write OBA's, the 3 UC API's, the Exchange webservices API, the OpenXML API, the Live Meeting web services, Speech Server, WPF and WCF.... If I only knew where to start....
And thanks to Matthijs for introducing me to the New York strip @ Morton's. Absolutely loved it! His blog also contains a number of movies that were shown during the breaks and in the keynotes. You can find them here.