SharePoint Conference 2014 Recap

Last week I attended the 2014 SharePoint Conference. 
This was my second SPC and I was able to pace myself enough to keep much better notes up until the last day. Last year I had burned out early, as there is only so many sessions one can attend in a week, my mind was numb. I attended a variety of sessions including Executive, ITPro, Developer and Business User. I think this was the reason why my last SPC was so difficult for me by the final day, as I had attended pure ITPro and Developer sessions and took 2 tests, whew! Exhausting.

Keynote
The Keynote was delivered by President Bill Clinton who encouraged us to "do good" while making advancements with our technology. He impressed us with examples of how technology assisted The Clinton Foundation's efforts in (among a few) post earthquake Haiti to align the country's only mobile provider with the Dutch bank so that people can have access to banking and their money. 
Basically, make the world a better place with technology. 
(See 'Matrix Reloaded' and 'IronMan' and 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' movies for shining examples of how Technology can Do Good)


User Voice 
There were many product announcements made, which I will blog separately. The single most impressive take away for me was the incredible openness and reaching out that the MSFT Office and SharePoint teams expressed with the attendees. It was very refreshing. My Tweets were answered and favorited by those teams many times. In fact, When Sonya Koptyev announced the UserVoice site at the InfoPath Roadmap session we were blown away that they had launched an entire site dedicated to our user feedback.

Office Social Graph and Oslo
The next BigThing was the OpenGraph and Oslo. This blew my mind because of the nature of an app fabric that connects content with Users, AD and Yammer activity feeds. The code name Oslo is the display method for the Announcements on steroids style view that is so exciting, blogs are sprouting up about it like mad daily. 

Connecting Content through People
Oslo is a search technology mostly, and it inspires us to search for people instead of document names or metadata. Content is trending around people, or me. People present content to me. I search for these trends and OfficeGraph filters and bubbles content that I want to see through Oslo display templates.