Kurt DelBene & Jeff Teper: SharePoint Conference 2011

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Microsoft senior director of SharePoint product management, Jared Spataro. (Applause.)

JARED SPATARO: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to Anaheim, and welcome to SharePoint Conference 2011. Are you guys excited to be here? (Cheers, applause.) All right. That’s a little weak for a crowd that should be 7,500 people. Are you excited to be here? (Cheers, applause.) All right! I know I am.

I’m Jared Spataro. I’ll be your host for the keynotes this morning, and I’ll also be your host throughout the four days of the conference.

We want to take a special moment to thank you for spending your time with us this week. On behalf of the entire SharePoint team, we truly appreciate you taking the time to come and visit us here and attend the conference.

We also want to give a special thanks to our sponsors, Quest Software, who’s our premier sponsor, and AvePoint, who is our keynote sponsor. This year’s SharePoint Conference will be the biggest ever with over 7,500 attendees, and we couldn’t have done it without these two partners. So, thank you very much, and we hope that you go and visit them in their booths. (Applause.)

Before I tell you what’s in store for you this week, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the incredible journey that we have all been on together as a community over the last two years. I thought that would also provide some context for the theme of our conference this year, Productivity Delivered.

Many of you were probably with us in Las Vegas when we took the covers off SharePoint 2010. We had a three-hour long keynote to show you all of the new features and capabilities that we were bringing to market.

We brought out the big guns with Steve Ballmer, who headlined the conference by talking about why and how SharePoint was important for Microsoft as a company. And this guy here on the right did one of the longest product demos in Microsoft history. In fact, I remember the first time I went through it with the team, I think I gave them a little scare. They told me that it was so long, and I was so boring, that they were sure that I had management potential. (Laughter.)

People, however, were very excited about SharePoint 2010. In fact, some were so moved that they literally ran off to get married, and there’s a nice picture. After all, we were in Vegas; what more could you expect?

And by the end of the week, even Huey Lewis was singing the praises of SharePoint 2010 and was a SharePoint fan. We were incredibly proud of the product and what we had been able to do with it, and we were so excited to show you all of the new things that were going to be available to you.

Now, moments like that are really special for a product team, because in many ways you’re unveiling your baby to the world. You hope that people like it and that they’ll want to use it.

But at the same time, you have this realization. You realize that what happens next isn’t up to you. What happens next depends on what customers and partners go and do with your product. And over the last two years, my goodness, as a community have you gone and done.

So, today’s theme for the conference is Productivity Delivered to celebrate all of the amazing things that you have done with SharePoint 2010. You have taken it to places that we never imagined it would go, and in doing so you have redefined the way people all over the world are getting work done.

Thanks to you, SharePoint is now one of the biggest businesses at Microsoft. It blew past a billion dollars three years ago, the fastest product to ever reach that milestone. And it continues to grow at double digits today. It is truly an incredible business thanks to your work. Here are some really interesting stats. To date, we’ve sold over 125 million licenses of SharePoint to more than 65,000 customers. That’s scale. In fact, if SharePoint were a standalone business, it would be one of the top 50 software firms in the world.

But it’s not just scale that we’re worried about as a team. We want to make sure that we drive impact. And we’re particularly proud of the fact that while SharePoint was known as a departmental solution very early in its life, today 67 percent of our enterprise customers have rolled out SharePoint for everyone for very, very broad adoption. Perhaps most importantly, when people get SharePoint, they like it. SharePoint is rated No. 1 in satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, awareness, and market share.

And then, finally, although it was just 12 weeks ago that we released Office 365 and SharePoint Online, we are proud that we already have millions of customers who are using it to get their work on a daily basis. In short, SharePoint is on fire. And that’s not due to us, that is due to you and your work.

And at the conference here, the theme of Productivity Delivered is to celebrate the work that you’ve done. And even more importantly, to give you a chance to talk with each other to share best practices, and to understand what more that you can do with SharePoint.

So, here’s what is in store for you for the rest of the conference. This morning we have two fantastic keynote speakers. Many of you know Jeff Teper, who is our Corporate Vice President of Office Business Platforms. Jeff has been with SharePoint since the beginning, and because of that has a very unique perspective on the product. As you’ll see when he is incredibly passionate about SharePoint, and today he’s going to share three guiding principles that really have shaped the way SharePoint has become what it is today, and will continue to shape what it becomes into the future. I think you’ll really enjoy what you hear from Jeff.

We’re also very privileged to have Kurt DelBene join us. Kurt has been at the heart of Microsoft’s productivity strategy for many years, and 12 months ago he was appointed President of the Microsoft Office Division, where he oversees everything that we do related to both our servers, things like Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, as well as the Office client. Now, Kurt is very focused on the technology, and is excited to share with you his vision for productivity as well as the value of the cloud for our customers.

Once we finish the keynote today, we will have 240 great breakout sessions for you to attend, and My SPC is a great tool to keep track of the latest status. We also have a great mobile phone app that we know many of you have taken advantage of, and we encourage you to use that so that you always have the latest information.

In addition, there are over 200 partners in the Partner Pavilion this year. We hope that you’ll visit them. And we have also added a new track, a non-technical track, that will focus on end user adoption. And that will run over the course of lunch and breaks. Again, we hope you take advantage of those things.

Now, of course, anyone who is familiar with SharePoint Saturdays, and with SharePoint knows that the SharePoint community doesn’t go home when everyone else clocks out. And so, every night this week we have some fantastic events for you. This evening we have Club SPC where we will have the Chameleon, our DJ here, a member of our technical product management team, Tina Newton. Many of our team will be there. I will be on the floor, and I look forward to mixing and mingling with you in a very informal setting.

Tuesday is a big night for us. We’ll be together, hopefully you’ll join us at the happiest place on earth. I know my children were very, very jealous of it, and I heard that a couple of you just didn’t even tell your kids where you were coming. That probably was a very smart move on your part.

Wednesday we’ll finish things up with an expo reception and ATE, stands for Ask The Experts, where we will have all of our Microsoft experts on hand to answer questions that you have about the product, or about your deployment.

I also know that there are plenty of very fun things going on, partner parties that are sponsored by the 200 partners that we have in attendance. So, we hope you have a good time by day, and by night.

Now, as we reflected on the last two years in this incredible journey, we thought that it would be fitting, very proper, if we could bring in an A List celebrity to property represent the product, and more importantly the community. We wanted someone who really could show their passion for SharePoint. So, a couple of weeks ago, Kurt, Jeff and I spent some time in Hollywood reviewing the talent. We wanted to see if we could find a good and spokesperson.

I thought it might be interesting for you to see how that went for us, and get a little bit of a behind the scenes view of how we found our next speaker. Let’s roll the film.

(Video segment.)

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Corporate Vice President of Office Business Platform Jeff Teper.

JEFF TEPER: Good morning. (Applause.)

Thank you very much. We were going to have you all sing the theme song to The Brady Bunch, but we thought it would be a little too early in the morning for that sort of group hug. So, we’ll spare you that. Maybe after a few beers we’ll start singing old TV shows.

Anyway, so thank you very much for coming this week. The team is incredibly fired up to spend the week with you, to hear the things you’re doing with SharePoint, to share best practices, to promote networking, to get your feedback on future releases.

Maybe I thought I’d start with a little story. A couple of weeks ago I met with one of our larger customers in Redmond. They came out, their IT department was on one side of the room, and their business users were on the other side. And they said, Jeff, could you come show us SharePoint, SharePoint does a lot of stuff and we’re not really we want to sort of get our hands around it. And they’d been using SharePoint for a variety of things for a couple of years.

I went in and demoed how we use it inside Microsoft, mainly focusing on what the product did out of the box. And so for the whole hour the business side of the table, if you will, was saying “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that. Are we doing that?” “No, we’re not doing that.” “Can we do that?” So, it struck me as I was getting ready for this conference that one of the themes I wanted to hit really hard with everybody is get the most out of this week. So, you never say I didn’t know SharePoint could do that, or the users that you work with back in your organization never say I didn’t know SharePoint could do that. So, we’re really excited to work with you and share all the information across the community, so that you get the most out of the big investment you’ve made.

As you know, we’ve been at this for a bit. We’re working really hard. Jared announced that we hit a major milestone with the SharePoint community reaching 125 million people around the world. And it is really great that the work we’re all doing together to use technology to improve collaboration and organizations of all shapes and sizes is really starting to pay off. That passion, that drive to improve collaboration technology is motivating us every day to work with users, to work with developers, to work with IT, to work with companies, to work with charities, to work with partners, to really take all the feedback of the community and build the very best collaboration technology we can for you.

I think part of the fun through that journey is that we’ve always tried to take a pretty unique approach with SharePoint. We sort of tried to challenge the status quo in the very first release, when we took portals and collaboration and said they’re just the fabric of websites. There’s a lot of people who said, no, no, the industry doesn’t work that way, portals, collaboration, doc management, they’re separate and never the twain shall meet. And so part of what we’ve done and tried to do is help you break down the collaboration silos by really charting a new course for collaboration technology.

I thought this morning I’d walk through three of the guiding principles for that work. Redefining collaboration, unleashing a broad partner ecosystem, whether you’re tracking kid’s homework, or tracking a large oil refinery, we want a partner solution available on the SharePoint platform. And then building a world-class platform that can span everything from the viral departmental deployments of SharePoint that were sort of the origin of the product, to the largest enterprise infrastructures, the largest Internet sites, and now with Office 365 what will be the largest business cloud computing service.

So, let’s start with the first of the principles around redefining collaboration. Again, I think the key to the success of SharePoint, and the fun about being in the community, it’s certainly the fun for us and hopefully the fun for all of you, is sort of coming at this with a new perspective. And the very first core of what we did along there was the thinking we did around the user experience, this idea of self-service, that IT could deploy a utility, if you will, for websites, that users could just go, create, and customize, and adapt their own websites for whatever need they have. And we thought that was really fundamental to empowering users, to helping business be more agile, be more responsive to the changes in the world out there.

So, that idea of a self-service user experience has permeated SharePoint from the beginning. It’s part of our challenge a little bit, too, sometimes, because IT will come and say, hey, how do I get a handle on this, I’ve got thousands of SharePoint sites, and I think at this point in the maturation of the SharePoint product and guidance we have a very good solution for balancing that end user empowerment and governance.

That focus, though, on self-service continues. We’re continuing to sort of think about how we can empower users more and more. One of my favorite features of SharePoint 2010 is the work we’ve done around self-service business intelligence. In the past you used to have a data-warehousing guru build a large cube, and publish it out to people, and worry about whether it will bring the server down.

We worked very closely with SharePoint and Excel, and SQL on this thing called self-service BI and PowerPivot for SharePoint and Excel, where you can go bind the tens of millions of records in Excel, publish it to a SharePoint site and navigate that in ways that used to take months to build that kind of solution.

I was thinking about this, last night we had a dinner and I sat next to a customer and we didn’t sign legal approval for this, so I won’t mention their name, but he’s with a large bank. And he was telling me his favorite feature was access services in SharePoint 2010. And I sort of was asking him about the background and so forth. He’s not in IT. He’s in the business group. And he loved access services, because they could bring in all the disparate customer data from across the world in this bank, and the end users could create custom views of that and publish that to SharePoint. That kind of thing was something he’d given up hope, to some extent, that IT in the past, a few years ago, could have satisfied his custom requirements for custom solutions. Again, it’s this idea of a self-service experience for rich collaboration capabilities that we’ll keep pushing on.

The next area we broke ground on, and this was also controversial, was this idea of a social fabric. The concept that these websites or groups are not silos, but you want a consistent experience across personal sites, team sites, portals, intranets, extranets, all hosted on a consistent architecture, all linked together with a common secure search and identity service, so that as you move from one group to another you could click and see a user’s profile, get what teams they’re on, get the documents they’ve published, if you have rights to see those documents even existed.

That social fabric we think was one of the most powerful ideas in SharePoint, when we introduced the My Site capability. Everybody else, if you recall at the time had personalized home pages and we thought, God, the sort of Times Square view of all the blinking lights, we need to do that. But, really the exciting idea was this idea of a social fabric anchored on the individual across the intranet, and tied in with various communication and collaboration tools.

One of the most exciting features of the 2010 release we did along these lines of the social fabric is the Outlook Social Connector, where a lot of people start and work in Outlook, managing through email, and to have them in the context of that communication see what somebody has written and done on SharePoint, on public social networks, to be able to reach in different communication tools, be it audio/video conferencing over IP technology, or whether it’s scheduling an appointment, going to their My Site, getting more information, that was really breaking down, again, these technology silos that prevented people from building relationships and sharing best practices in the organization.

So, that was really a second principle of ours and along the way on this it was very important that we gave an environment that could be managed and governed. Improving productivity, particularly in the economic era we’ve gone through in the last couple of years, was not enough. We’ve heard that loud and clear, that we have to have a hard dollar savings in the work we do with SharePoint in addition to the productivity benefits. So, we have many, many customers who have talked to us about the details behind that.

One, for example, is Constellation Energy, that consolidated 5,000 SharePoint sites and 30 intranet sites on a consistent architecture, made the organization a lot more productive, but also saved and was able to prove to the finance people in the organization they saved over a million dollars net of all the cost of doing that work. We have many, many organizations like that where they say, you know, we made this work with the IT leads, and the CFO, because of the hard dollar savings, but we really love SharePoint because of what it means for our end users and our teams.

The third of the areas that we’ve tried to push the envelope on was that collaboration shouldn’t just be for inside the organization, it should transcend the company. In a more competitive global economy, we’re always trying to work better with customers and partners. So, that means extending collaboration outside the firewall.

Jared showed a number of statistics about the 2010 release and the uptake. One of the ones I’m most excited about is the hockey stick growth of SharePoint for Internet sites. That’s our special licensed version of SharePoint that allows you to host your Internet site or extranet site without necessarily having to pay for each non-employee user. It’s sort of a special license for that. And while we have about 80 percent of the Fortune 500 using SharePoint on their intranet, we’ve seen a hockey stick that now about 25 to 30 percent of them are using SharePoint for their Internet and extranet collaboration, as well.

And so, I would encourage everybody, if you’re not already doing so, to think about breaking down the walls of your organization, and using collaboration technology to work better with your customers and partners.

And we’re taking this to a new level with the new release of Office 365 to make it even easier to get a rich user experience, to build a social fabric, and to reach out with customers and partners. Many of the initial early adopters of Office 365 were people who were trying to get a solution up very quickly to have secure collaboration with their customers and partners, and we’ll talk more about Office 365 throughout the morning.

I thought it’s better to show than talk about our customers, and one that we thought would be pretty fun to share with you is SpaceX, who is using SharePoint to literally be out of this world. And so, let’s take a look at what SpaceX is doing with SharePoint.

(Video segment.)

JEFF TEPER: You know, there’s a rule in technology companies: Whenever you can get a rocket engine in a video for a customer case study, you’ve got to go for that. So, that was pretty fun to go work on.

One of the things we get asked a lot about is, gee, what’s next? And, you know, while we’re balancing the fact that SharePoint is a very rich product, a product that requires 240 sessions here this week to sort of tap into its full depth, we know that you want to make sure that SharePoint’s a big bet for the future.

This year, and I’ve been on this SharePoint team since the beginning, sort of there’s a little bit of a debate about which meeting with Bill Gates he said yes. Whether it was ’97 or ’98, we were sort of working on it anyway. But at least it’s been over a decade that we’ve been working on it.

I can guarantee you, this has been the busiest year ever for the SharePoint engineering team. As Jared said, just 12 weeks ago, we released Office 365 to make SharePoint available to all organizations of all sizes with greater time to market, greater ease of use than anything else out here. There is no other collaboration technology that you can get up and running as quickly as you can with SharePoint, available in Office 365.

And we are already working on updates to that. You’ll see an update by the end of the year with some new capabilities, one of which I’ll talk about in a few minutes.

In addition to that, the SharePoint team is working on the next major release. We’re not going to talk about it this week. This week is focused on what you can do with 2010 and Office 365 today, so we’re focused on that. But I wanted to assure you, this is the biggest release of SharePoint we’ve ever done, the largest engineering team, and the things — whether it’s the developer experience or the user experience, we are going to break new ground again.

One of my favorite stats is we have four times the number of visual designers, UI folks who help us make SharePoint pretty and fast and responsive, that we had the last release. So, user experience, social networking, developer platform, we are investing big in this technology. And it will continue to be with these guiding principles we talked about around breakthroughs in the user experience and the social fabric.

Let me move on to the second of the guiding principles, which is the developer ecosystem. How many developers are out there? There was one “woo” over there, not bad for nine o’clock in the morning. I’ll be honest, it’s nine o’clock in the morning in Seattle, too, most of the developers in our team have not shown up to work yet, so trust us, they’ll work pretty late in the night, pizzas have already been ordered and all that.

You are among 700,000 developers working on SharePoint around the world. We have just been blown away by the adoption and creativity and innovation of solutions being built on SharePoint.

Just a few minutes ago, because it changes a lot, back stage I looked on my phone on the number of books on SharePoint on Amazon.com. 1162 books. It’s sort of a sign of just how, like, rabid and hungry the developer community is for more information. And we certainly hope that you get a lot of great content on the development platform this week. During Kurt’s talk, we have a sort of fun, new demo we’ll show around Visual Studio integration that we think developers will be excited about.

Overall, the new release, people have been telling us we finally did the things that core developers wanted, the integration with Visual Studio, a modern object model that integrates with REST services. The business connectivity services, one of the big highlight features of 2010.

People love this idea. And I think this is one where we were truly innovative relative to what else is out there that you could leverage the SharePoint user experience, but bind to external line of business or database data in a way that is loosely coupled. You can not only get read-only views, that’s easy, anybody can do read-only. But read-write, search, integration with profiles, and take that data offline. That was sort of really a breakthrough for us. And we worked on supporting a spectrum of capabilities, everything from helping people front end a simple database in SharePoint, to the work we did with SAP around the Duet Enterprise for SharePoint and SAP that we launched back in February that allows read-write access to an SAP system from the SharePoint user interface.

And we did that for two reasons: One is there’s a pretty big investment in SAP out there that we wanted to help people get the most out of with SharePoint. The second is to show as a proof case for the broad range of developers, whatever you are building, we could handle everything from very simple things to the most sophisticated ERP systems out there. And the response to business connectivity services has been great.

On the ISV front, in addition to think like that partnership, we’ve got thousands of partners building apps on top of SharePoint. We have, I think, about 200 here this week, and I encourage you to take a look at them. Some are sort of around systems management stuff, some are around end user solutions, some are around vertical solutions for things like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and so forth. Really rich ecosystem available for SharePoint.

One of the things we’ve heard from that community, though, whether they’re corporate developers or systems integrators, independent software companies, is, hey, we want to bring these apps to the cloud. And we introduced in the first release of SharePoint Online in Office 365 back in June a set of extensibilities and documentation on MSDN, and we are continuing to invest in that.

So, I’m really pleased to announce that in the first update of Office 365, SharePoint will be coming out later this year, by the end of the year, the team’s sort of getting ready to prop the datacenters on it. We’ll include the business connectivity support including read-write access to Web services to make it easy for people to build cloud-based applications that front end other data. And this is just a step, and we’ll be doing more and more to enable rich, cloud-based applications that can be run in a consistent way on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud as we have with Office 365.

So, we’re very excited about that announcement, and that is just the first of many things we’ll be doing in the coming months to enhance SharePoint Online and Office 365.

Let me go back and talk about the third group of developers, the systems integrators. This is a really important audience. I know there’s a number of folks here from those kinds of companies. Again, to make sure there’s a wide spectrum of choice from everything from sort of focused, agile consultants to large global systems integrators, many of whom are training thousands of people on SharePoint. We have over 4,000 partners in the SharePoint ecosystem building solutions. In the last 12 months alone, they have trained 93,000 people on building solutions on SharePoint.

One of the things they’ve asked us for and you’ve asked us for is let us know who really are the deep experts, who are the black belts, if you will?

So, I’m really pleased today to announce a new level of certification, the Microsoft Certified Architect for SharePoint, and these people will have a level of depth and training and certification that is unmatched on complex SharePoint enterprise deployments and application development. We’ll publish much more detail on that today on Microsoft.com, but it really will be a way for many of you to consider becoming certified architects, but even if you’re just looking to hire an individual or expertise, a credential that you can look for that shows the greatest level of depth and expertise in the SharePoint community. So, very excited about the MCA certification.

Just as we talked about in redefining collaboration, we’re going to break new ground on the SharePoint platform. Whether you are an end user trying to build solutions in Access without writing a single line of code and getting it done in a day, or whether you’re a very sophisticated developer firing up Visual Studio to build solutions on a large-scale Internet side or front ending an SAP system, we’re very focused on bringing the architecture and tools forward for application development.

The things we’ll be building on are things you can learn about this week, the next release of SharePoint will run all the applications built on it that the current version runs. But we’ll have a big focus on the work in Visual Studio, the object model we’ve exposed that allows you to access SharePoint remotely from the client or other servers, via REST, and this read-write business connectivity services. Those will sort of be the core of things we do building SharePoint and I’d encourage you to look at those in depth this week if you’re a developer.

Let me talk about the third and final pillar, which is building a world-class platform. More than anything, this has been the journey of SharePoint. We started out the team with a couple dozen developers, sort of trying to figure out how people could make websites without having to ask anybody’s permission, having to write a line of code, how could you just press a button and get a team site, get a portal, add stuff to it, and go?

From that team, we’ve grown to over a thousand people working on just R&D, not sales, service, support, marketing, we’ve got many, many more around the world, but there’s over 1,000 people on the development team working very hard right now — or in a couple hours when they show up — on SharePoint R&D. And each step of the way, we’ve had this vision of building a world-class engineering team, and the very best collaboration architecture of any product in the industry.

Some of this is internal development and hiring we’ve done, some of this has been a very close partnership, as I think you’ve seen in our work with the .NET team and SQL Server team and a lot of work going on now with the Azure team that you’ll see down the road. And some of this has been doing a couple of selected acquisitions. We acquired Groove Networks and FAST Search to bring the very best expertise in the world on synchronization and enterprise search into the team. I’m very excited those groups continue to be vibrant parts of the SharePoint engineering team several years after those acquisitions have been completed.

So, a really great team. And I thought I’d talk a little bit about how we think about SharePoint’s architecture. The first thing we’ve tried to do is build a unified platform in a way where no one else had before. Again, the idea that a document management system didn’t have to be separate from a collaboration system. And so we thought about our architecture in two dimensions. One is supporting the spectrum of websites, everything from individual sites to large-scale Internet sites. And the second is supporting a spectrum of content, everything from very ad-hoc content like blogs and wikis and OneNote notebooks that people could be collaborating on real time, that’s a very special kind of architectural requirement to support that sort of real-time updating of a shared notebook across different members of the team.

All the way up, and this is, again, I think something no one else has done, to very large-scale document management, records management systems. In 2010, we broke ground and we’re going to show an example of this in a second. Being able to support hundreds of millions of documents in large-scale repositories with taxonomy, with workflow, with document sets or collections of documents being managed as a whole. So, again, getting to a single platform to give you the choice and flexibility across all your collaboration needs was a big focus of our architectural work.

But we’ve also focused a lot on the manageability. We know we couldn’t just deliver a SharePoint utility that end users could make an unlimited number of websites from, we needed to give an infrastructure where you could govern it for compliance, for availability, whether it’s PowerShell support or policy management, we have more knobs in SharePoint for administrative control than I think anybody ever imagined.

Again, the focus of this week is — I wouldn’t want anybody to leave this week thinking there’s not a great governance solution for SharePoint. Lots of things built on the product, lots of value-added things for partners, lots of training and white papers. This may have been something we heard a few years ago is how do I govern SharePoint? Not an issue. We have lots and lots of examples of the largest enterprises governing SharePoint.

I thought rather than keep talking about architectural investments we’d show it to you. So, let me bring up Richard Riley, who’s going to show some of the work we’ve done around scalability and manageability for SharePoint 2010. Richard? (Applause.)

RICHARD RILEY: Thank you. OK, hi, everyone. I have a very, very big demo for you today, for a very big audience.

We only just managed to squeeze into these two server racks to my left here. And the topics we’re going to talk about are primarily around scale, performance, and high-availability. This demo is actually based on the SharePoint 2010 scalability testing that we just published, and significantly changed support boundaries with data files that you can actually put into SharePoint.

I’m actually using the same hardware and the same data set that we used for that scalability testing. I’m going to start by having a look how we configure the hardware and how we deployed SharePoint and SQL, and that should give you an idea of the scale we reached in that testing.

We tried to source the biggest and fastest servers and storage we could find, and the hardware to my left was very kindly loaned to us by EMC and NEC.

So, we take a look at the storage, we’ve got an EMC VNX5700, which has 400 terabytes of data in it. I’m sorry, 400 terabytes of storage space in it. And then we have three servers NEC generously loaned to us, two of them the NEC 5800s are running SQL Server Denali CTP 3.

And then that monster of a machine at the bottom, that’s running our virtualized SharePoint infrastructure, and that thing’s got one terabyte of memory, and 80 cores in it. So, that’s a huge machine.

So, let me show you what we’re looking at in terms of logical architecture. This is a fairly significant SharePoint deployment, there are 15 servers in this farm. We have six Web front ends, five fast index and search boxes, and then four [inaudible] machines.

And this Visio diagram here is brought to you courtesy of the Visio team. They’ve done some work with SharePoint and then add into Visio to kind of visualize your SharePoint topology in a really neat way. This is available for download today from Microsoft.com/Visio, so you should go check that out right after the keynote, very cool.

So, this is clearly a big deployment. But, wait, there’s more. I want to show you what we’ve done with SQL. So, if we just drop into SQL Enterprise Manager, I’m going to show you what data we’ve got sitting underneath this farm. I’m going to right-click on our content database here, which is SD content one. Drop down to properties, and we’re going to show you something you don’t necessarily see every day in a SharePoint deployment.

Take a look at the database size that we’ve got there. That is 15 million megabytes, roughly translates to be 14.4 terabytes of data that we’ve got in one content database for SharePoint. That comprises around 108 million items split across two document centers that we’ve pulled down from Wikipedia and then pushed into various types of documents.

Now, it should be clear at this point, that there’s an awful lot of head room in those servers I’ve got buzzing away over there. They’re actually barely breaking into a sweat. So, if you’re planning on heading into this scale territory, then definitely consult our basic capacity planning guidance before you do so.

So, let’s take a look at what this can do in terms of performance. For that, I’m just going to drop into Visual Studio. And you see we’ve got a load test running. Now, we’ve got 16 test agents running against this server live right now on stage, simulating loads of seven and a half thousand concurrent users. So, essentially, that’s all of the faces looking at me right now in this room. You’re all doing something on this server as I’m talking.

So, that’s a significant load on this box. And I’m running a balanced load of search, browse, and open. And even with very conservative masks, that number of people with say a 5 percent concurrency rate is probably a user base of around 150,000 people, but that’s conservative, it probably would be a lot more.

We’ve also made it easily for you to follow along with the demo by putting the dashboard around the side of the screen. What that dashboard is actually doing is showing live performance counters from the load test that we’re running. As I go through the demo, you’re going to be able to see what’s happening on the server with those counters there. They’re live, they’re running the same — they’re just representing the counters we’ve got in the load test.

So, just to add one more user to that account, and I’m going to go do something in SharePoint and show you kind of how quickly it’s responding under this sort of load.

So, I’m going to drop into one of those document centers. And I’m going to drop into a document library which has over a million items in it, and I’m just going to navigate using the metadata navigation panel, and show you how quickly that comes back. Let’s just filter by all audiences, and we’ll hit content type and data sheet. So, again, look how quickly that is coming back.

Now, obviously, in the real world, you’re probably not going to go browsing through 60 million items, a million items in a document library. You’re going to want to use search.

So, we’ve got FAST configured on this box, too. And I’m just going to show you the FAST experience when we run in with this number of users and this amount of content.

So, we’re going to search for the hash tag. This is a little-known feature of FAST, and it will basically return everything in the index ranked primarily by the newest content first.

So, I want to point out two special things on this screen. The first one, we have almost 108 million items in this index, the second one is it took 0.23 seconds for FAST to return that result set to me. That’s pretty impressive. (Applause.)

So, let’s do a search for something useful like SharePoint. Again, comes back extremely quickly. We’ll filter using the refiners on the side for Excel. And we will view in the browser.

So, you’ll see that comes up — any second now — there we go. Excel comes up, and you can see the dashboard on the side, service ticking away, it’s all happy and good. So, that gives you an idea of the performance we’re getting from the machine.

Let me go on to the third topic, which is around high availability. As I mentioned at the start, we’re running SQL Denali CTP 3 with always-on configured, that’s the new high-availability mode for SQL Server Denali, and that gives us redundancy between PACNEC04 and PACNEC05, as you can see on the screen there, the SQL Server’s on the right-hand side of the dashboard.

We already have a great high-availability story for SharePoint, and it only gets much bigger and much stronger with Denali. So, let’s take a quick look at the always-on dashboard, and I can show you what we’re talking about with Denali.

So, we’ll pop into SQL. There we go. And this is the always-on dashboard. Couple of things I want to say here is we have a primary instance, which is PACNEC04, we have an available replica which is PACNEC05, and you can have up to four of these replicas. And then the third thing I want to show you here is we’ve actually got all of the databases that SharePoint needs to run replicated. So, this is a whole thing failing over. It’s not just a content DB, it’s everything.

So, given I’ve been talking about high availability, I can probably guess that some of you are kind of figuring out what’s going to come next. We’re actually going to pull the network on PACNEC04 and we’re going to watch it fail over live on stage, the whole 14.4 terabytes of data, we’re going to watch it fail over, live on stage and see what happens. This should be a little bit of fun.

Now, things are going to happen quickly in the next 60 seconds. It really didn’t take that long for this to fail over. Let me give you two things to watch. The first one is Windows System Manager, and you want to keep your eyes on those three green arrows. This is SQL failing over, and this literally happens within five to eight seconds of us pulling the plug.

And then watch on the right-hand side of the dashboard and you’ll see the load test pick up again on PACNEC05, the Web front end loads drop, and then spike again as those test agents reconnect. And all of this actually happens faster than I can walk over to the box and get back and click the next bit in the demo.

So, I’m going to invite my trusty demo assistant on stage to actually pull the cable. Let’s be frank, I don’t really want to do it. (Applause.) Welcome. You ready to make a big career decision in front of seven and a half thousand people? (Laughter.)

OK. So, keep your eyes on those green arrows, keep your eyes on the dashboard, don’t blink. You ready? After three — ready? Three, two, one, pull it out. There you go, SQL is failing over within five seconds. So, we’re over. It failed that whole 14.4 terabyte database over. Let’s just pop back into SharePoint. We’ll try and go back to the home page, that’s failed, SharePoint’s trying to reconnect. We’ll give that a second to get those connections back. I’m sitting in that list of people trying to reconnect.

You can see PACNEC04 is sitting there flashing, PACNEC05 is going to pick up the load. You can see the Web front end utilization is starting to spike back up, so there’s reconnection. Let’s just go back and hit the Refresh button, and we’ll give that a second to respond. And hopefully if all of our planning goes right, we have SharePoint back. (Applause.)

And just to prove to you that we can still browse around, I’ll drop back into that document library and do the filtering and we’ve got all of our data back.

So, that happened so fast, I want to recap what you just saw. Not only did we just fail over a 14.4 terabyte database with 108 million items under a load of seven and a half thousand concurrent users without me doing a thing, we also failed over the complete SharePoint farm in literally about 40 seconds. Config, managed meta data, admin, content, everything failed over. This is full-fault fail-over, people, and it’s actually pretty cool.

Hopefully you enjoy the rest of the week, thank you for listening. (Applause.)

JEFF TEPER: There are two kinds of reactions people have to that demo. One is, wow, when can I get it? People are logging into Microsoft.com, downloading the Visio Web parts, trying it out already, I see a couple laptops already moving. And then the other reaction to it is: I don’t want to worry about any of that. Can I take Richard home with me, please? I like his accent. (Laughter.) And he seems to be pretty good with the server stuff.

Well, you don’t have to take Richard Riley home with you because we are making all this available, again, for organizations of all sizes in the cloud with Office 365. This is, to some extent, a tiny version of what we’re running in our datacenters around the world, thousands and thousands of servers running SharePoint.

I thought I’d talk a little bit about the journey to how we got there. This is not something we sort of decided overnight, let’s just make a cloud service. We knew that we wanted to make the collaboration technology that we built in the Office team available to everybody, everybody in the world. And so we started the work back around for the 2003 release on what you might call today cloud software principles, the idea of stateless Web front ends, partitioned databases, load balancing, unique worker roles for different services, things like Excel service or the search service that could be scaled up or out in sort of independent ways.

And this allowed companies to sort of host their own internal clouds, if you will, starting with 2003 and 2007 where they supported tens and in many cases hundreds of thousands of SharePoint sites on their internal utility.

We built an experience for running a service like this ourselves dating back about six years ago. Our very first customer was the Energizer company, the battery bunny company, where we hosted Energizer SharePoint sites, in an offering that we called at that time “Business Productivity Online Services.” As you can see with Jared’s fine delivery this morning, we’ve gotten a little bit better marketing folks with a little bit more polished branding. So, we have a much more friendly Office 365 than not-so-friendly BPOS.

But it gave us a ton of experience with lots of customers of different sizes that we built into the 2010 product architecture. So, the 2010 server was designed to be the thing that we’d run in the Office 365 service and as I said, over the last year or so, year and 18 months, the engineering team has been working incredibly hard on the cloud service fabric, deploying provisioning systems, billing systems, telemetry, monitoring, disaster recovery, so that we could manage initially thousands and eventually tens and hundreds of thousands of servers for tens of millions of people.

And we were a little bit excited the day we sort of launched, went back in June, about how the response would be, how the service would handle the work and so forth. And very excited in the first two weeks of the launch of Office 365, 50,000 organizations, not individual, organizations signed up for Office 365, including SharePoint Online, and we just started making SharePoint sites without anybody having to worry about fail over and clustering or anything like that.

So, I really want to emphasize how excited we are about the availability of SharePoint to many more people with Office 365, but also reinforce our commitment to deliver servers. So, if you’re a small company running SharePoint on a Web front end and SQL Server, we’re going to continue supporting that in the future. If you want a private cloud offering built around something like our Hyper-V or other virtualization technology, we’re going to support that.

But the idea that we’re running SharePoint for millions of organizations from everything from a consultant who’s just hung out their shingle to large enterprises like a Coca-Cola enterprise, like McDonalds, like GlaxoSmithKline, like Novartis — organizations with tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The fact that SharePoint’s ecosystem is that broad and that we’re running servers at that scale is going to benefit the product we deliver to you as a server if you choose to run it yourself.

So, I think this is really, again, a unique aspect of our world-class platform is that we’ve invested in something that you can run where you want to run it.

So, there you have it. We talked about the three guiding principles for the SharePoint team, we’re driving very hard to continue to redefine collaboration in the user experience. You see an overwhelming set of capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and Office 365 that you can explore this week. More is coming, more innovation in the UI and more innovation in the social capabilities.

We’re driving to make a very large ecosystem that handles the broad spectrum of developers, everything from somebody building their own Access app in a few minutes, to very sophisticated Internet sites and line-of-business front end.

We’re driving to make SharePoint the most flexible collaboration platform. So, if you’re worried about handling hundreds of millions of documents for compliance and records management, we can do that. If you just want something that gives people sort of wikis plus, plus, with our OneNote experience where you have a real-time, collaborative notebook that you can take offline on your phone, on your PC, sort of really break new ground in sort of the collaboration model and don’t want to worry about sort of large-scale stuff like us, we can do that too, that’s a unique level of flexibility.

So, we’re driving very hard, the SharePoint engineering team is as passionate an organization as there is. We are really fired up to work with you this week and go back and keep working on the roadmap.

So, let me wrap with just thank you all, again, for attending this week. Make the most out of the investment. Again, you know, attend the sessions, talk to the partners, use the hands-on labs. Don’t go back to your organizations and ever say, “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that.”

Before we transition to Kurt, who will wrap up this morning with some exciting work on more depth on the cloud, we’re going to show a video of some of the exciting things customers are doing with SharePoint 2010.

So, thank you very much, hope to see you this week in some of the sessions, and thank you all.

(Video segment.)

JARED SPATARO: Now, that’s productivity delivered. eBay, Sketchers, and EA are just three examples of how Jeff’s guiding principles and the products that they’ve inspired are really changing the way people get things done.

You’ll be able to see more from customers just like them at the sessions this week, and we encourage you to take a look.

So, now we reach for the cloud. I mentioned earlier that Kurt DelBene is the President of Microsoft Office Division where he’s responsible for our information worker productivity strategy.

One very little-known fact about Kurt, though, is that he drives to work every morning in a 1967 Mini Cooper that he rebuilt and restored from the ground up in his spare time. He truly is an engineer at heart, has an incredible passion for the technology, and this morning, he’s going to talk to us about his vision for the future of productivity, about the importance of Office 365 and the value of the cloud. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming to the stage, Mr. Kurt DelBene. (Applause, music.)

KURT DELBENE: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here today. Before we start, though, how many people think that rebuilding a ’67 Mini is probably an exercise in futility? A few. I have to say, it’s computer controlled, though, for the very first time, and it’s probably the only Mini on the planet run fully by computer. It is not running SharePoint yet, but I’m going to try to figure out how to shoe-horn that in next time. (Laughter.)

It is really a fantastic opportunity to be here with you today. And it’s been a bit of a surreal experience for me, and I think for Jeff as well. We’ve both been involved in the SharePoint product for over 10 years. And you know, the surreal aspect of it started pretty early on for me. I got to the airport a little early and I met Adrianna. Adrianna, are you here? Yes, she runs — I heard her there. She runs Formotus, that does forms on top of SharePoint and talking about how the success of her business is driven by SharePoint’s popularity.

I then sat down in my seat in the airplane, and Joe — Joe, are you there from Walla Walla? He’s out there somewhere. And he runs his company doing optical defect recognition software. And they run SharePoint in their infrastructure. Imagine, if you will, a conveyor belt going along 15 feet a second full of peas and at some point when it detects a single pea that’s in error, a little piece of air pops up and ejects the pea out of this constant stream of peas going down the assembly line. And I thought to myself, finally, finally somebody has figured out the proper use case for SharePoint. (Laughter.) It took a long time, but there you have it.

But really, and then it continued here. You know, I got here and I saw the huge sign up there, SharePoint Conference, I saw somebody with a T-shirt and the back said “from Egypt.” So, clearly, we are a community, we’re a family of folks from around the world. But I have to say, the most surreal experience is looking in the back there and I cannot see the back of the hall. And so that is a fantastic accomplishment.

But it’s great to be here just to really celebrate the success that SharePoint has had, and really to think about it as a family of folks who are committed together. We’re committed on the development side. You all are committed in terms of running your businesses on SharePoint or being developers of SharePoint to really run your businesses more effectively. Together, to celebrate the success that we have had together as a family.

The statistics around SharePoint adoption have been fantastic recently. If it’s about the 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies that are now running SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 has now sold 62 million licenses, that’s just since SharePoint 2010 shipped, a fantastic accomplishment, and SharePoint 2010, better yet, we in the product team love this. It has the greatest product satisfaction of any version of SharePoint so far. So, great product, doing very, very well and you guys are liking it too.

And then over 700,000 developers committed to building SharePoint solutions in just the last year alone. There are 700,000 of you, folks like Formotus and others that are building solutions and building businesses on top of SharePoint.

Now, Jeff did a great job in talking to you about where SharePoint is, where we’re going. I’d like to kind of step back a little bit and put it in the context of how I think the Office Division is betting on SharePoint and where we’re going overall as an organization and the role that SharePoint plays in that future.

The way I’d like to do that is to kind of talk about a few trends that really drive how we think about the business because we spend a ton of time looking at where you guys are going, where the industry is going, and figuring out how to bring our products along in that context.

A few statistics I think are key. A few of them revolve around the fact that the nature of the workforce is changing. It’s a very diverse workforce, there are three generations that are active in the workforce at any particular time, and the styles and attitudes that those employees have and that you have to respond to is changing along with it.

So, some of the statistics that show you this, 65 percent of you are deploying social networking within your organization. Again, that’s a matter of taking the tools that live on the Internet, the expectations people have around communicating in a social environment, and really bring those into the organization in a relevant manner.

84 percent of organizations have people working remotely. It wasn’t that long ago the notion of working remotely was something that, quote unquote, a business didn’t support. But now it’s the case that everybody supports it, and it’s a critical need to have device support that supports that kinds of devices that people use each and every day.

So, the nature of how people work is changing and we have to change in our software and you have to change in your infrastructure along with that. But you’ve got challenges to actually make that happen. So, for example, 70 percent — this is a shocking statistic — 70 percent of IT budgets are spent maintaining inflexible and siloed systems where, you know, you have to keep that one up and running, it’s maybe not part of your future, but you know you have to keep it going.

And that’s probably one of the reasons that 80 percent of enterprises are thinking about moving to the cloud. The ability to get the latest and greatest software simply by logging on, simply by connecting your enterprise through the cloud has great appeal. It has appeal in terms of saving you money, it has appeal in terms of being able to upgrade to the next version of a software effortlessly and really get on the greatest software that exists, and also lets you focus more on the business fundamentals that you have, and that innovation that you need to do in the IT space and the business space that really sets your business apart.

So, these are some of the trends that really drive how we think about the business and how we think about where we want to push forward Office overall and SharePoint in particular.

So, if I were to talk about and articulate what our strategy is, and think of this about how the products that we have today fit together, and also kind of a prognostication of where you might think we were going in the future. And there’s really three main elements that I think about in terms of our vision of productivity. And those are, one, continue to lead in what productivity means on the PC, on the phone, and on browsers as well.

Two, it means about being leaders in the cloud and being leaders on your own terms. This is not about taking a consumer-oriented cloud service and saying, “Hey, enterprise, hey, small business, this is just what you want.” It’s about taking the products that you know and love and making sure that they work really, really well in the cloud.

And then, three, it’s about continuing to deliver for you a unified platform, that means a platform on the client, that means a platform on the server, so that you’re not building those siloed systems anymore, and really buying one product, deploying one product and having it be best-of-breed in its individual silos, but work well together. It works well together on the servers, and it connects richly to the client. Again, that’s a diversity of clients. That means having a fantastic experience on the PC, it means us thinking through on the Office division what’s the future of authoring, what is the future of data visualization, how do people take notes in a crowd, how do we get the best out of a meetings experience so that I can have a great interactive meeting with unified communications? But also store all that information for the future. And so that you don’t lose that information after a meeting, you can find it, you can use great products like SharePoint or FAST Search to hook people into that information regardless of where it is in the organization.

So, our strategy is threefold, and at the top level, I think it’s all about continuing to deliver to all of you this notion of a connected ecosystem that involves clients and servers working together to really allow you to connect to anybody in the organization, any subject, have a collaborative authoring experience, just as easily as that work individually, and really allow you to accomplish your goals by virtue of having this ecosystem where people can work together.

Now, the latest incarnation, and again, this is the notion of moving to the cloud, a critical part of our investments moving forward is Office 365. I’d like to kind of ground center what Office 365 is. I’m sure a bunch of you have talked about it, hopefully some have actually played with it and used the 30-day trial subscription.

But the real way to think about Office 365 is it’s where Office meets the cloud. And it’s part of a strategy of saying all the greatness and the goodness that you guys love in the Office client and the servers ought to be able to be available to you in the cloud in a no-excuses format. So, if you have a capability like, as Jeff said, the business connectivity services that you rely on SharePoint, that ought to be available to connect your business services to SharePoint in the cloud. Every iota of capability should move to the cloud and enable those same scenarios in a familiar way.

It is, in terms of its components, it’s about SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync being available as an online service, and it’s also about a subscription version of the client itself. And so the notion that is anybody can go to Office 365.com and they can purchase exactly the set of capabilities that they want. If they’ve already got Office on-premises, they can just go to the cloud services. They can select Exchange Online or SharePoint Online, providing that particular capability that works best for them.

For us, it was also about making sure that we have offerings that addressed each business class within our customer base. And so we’ve been very, very good in terms of delivering capabilities to enterprises, but it’s interesting that 99.7 percent of employers which employ half of the employees in the world are actually in small and medium-sized businesses.

And these are companies that actually didn’t have the ability to deploy or thought they didn’t have the ability to deploy Exchange at scale, deploy SharePoint, and deploy Lync. So, a big part of what we’ve done is to make sure that there’s an offering for small and medium businesses that actually was appropriate for those businesses, not just for the enterprise. So, it’s about having a scalable offering from small and medium business all the way up to the very largest enterprise that’s appropriate for each of those.

It’s an interesting statistic that 80 percent of the Office 365 small and medium businesses have never run SharePoint, have never run Exchange. I think there’s two great things there. That means we can have an even broader family next time that can come and celebrate the capabilities that these products have, but the other thing that I think is key for even bigger companies is that it allows us to take the innovation of creating incredibly easy-to-use products for small and medium business and deliver that back into the enterprise as well. So, we all benefit from broadening the set of people that can use it.

And then the final thing that I think is important to think about in terms of Office 365 is that it’s backed by Microsoft. And that’s a really key differentiator that I think is really critical to think about the value proposition. Backed by Microsoft really means it’s secure, it means it’s reliable, and it means that you’ll get robust support.

One of the things we hear from CIOs is that in terms of moving to the cloud, security is a critical component for them, that they’re super, super worried about with cloud services. And we take a multi-layered approach in terms of thinking about security. That means we think about physical-level security, it means we think about software-level security, and we think about policy as well. Who has access to the data? How you restrict that access for the right folks so that the data is secure.

And if you look overall, we have a number of customers that actually look very, very intensively at our security. Many of them walk away and say, “I think you’re actually doing it better than we could have done it internally either on our on-premises or if we went to a private cloud.” So security is absolutely critical. We are very, very committed to having the most secure offer on the planet.

Reliability is absolutely just as key. And it’s a multi-layered problem as well. It means having multiple datacenters across the world. It means geo-redundancy, like you saw in Jeff’s demo, being able to fail over effortlessly from one server to another. It means moving from the notion of mean times of failure to mean times to recovery. That means how quickly can you sense that a failure has occurred, how fast do you respond to that, and how fast do you communicate to customers that, oh, we have an issue, but it’s back up and running.

And then finally it’s about robust support. I think for me, the main theme here is that we have taken operation of the service and moved that directly into the product teams. So, the product teams are the ones that run the service each and every day. That’s good for two reasons: One, it means those are the people who know the service super well, and it also means that when they see a problem, you better believe that they’re going to turn the crank and figure out how to solve that problem for the next time so that they don’t get woken up in the middle of the night with an alert that fires. So, I think that’s a good thing for you. I think it’s a good thing for my development teams as well.

It also means having rich monitoring and optics into what’s going on in the service overall. That means, you know, you’ve got an alert that goes at various levels, how do you discern from that what the actual problem is with the service?

It means also getting portals for all of you so that you can see what’s going on with your service in a super, super rich way so that you know that your service is out or it’s not out, et cetera.

So, we’re seeing huge success in terms of the product so far, customers embracing it, really across the board. You’ve got small companies like Bee Insurance that’s really just two people who want to have the ability to always have somebody connect with a customer, all the way up to folks like GlaxoSmithKline.

GlaxoSmithKline in particular, huge cost-savings opportunity for them moving to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online. About being able to take on new IT tasks because they were able to reduce the costs with their core infrastructure around messaging and communications.

You get some folks that just want the cloud on their own terms, so Tampa General Hospital is a great example here. They didn’t have a case where everybody needed all the capabilities of the online service, they had a number of folks, 4500, that needed a more limited set of capabilities, and they had 2500 who wanted the full set of capabilities. So, again, the whole notion about having different profiles that fit different user groups, we were able to tailor an offering specifically for them.

For DuPont, a long-time Notes customer, it was about transitioning to Exchange, having an easy way to do that. And it was about communicating with their partners across the world on things like seed development in China. So, they were able to create an ecosystem that wasn’t just about their company, but it was a global set of partners across the world.

And then there’s the set of folks like NetHope, where it’s really about having super scarce resources in the IT department, and they’ve got to focus. They’ve got to figure out where they’re going to invest and do things that are unique for their business, and how they’re going to get a scalable infrastructure that really allows them to grow and deliver into new issues around the world, places where they need to jump in super, super quickly and get involved.

So, NetHope, for those of you who don’t know, is a non-profit organization that unites 33 of the world’s largest humanitarian relief organizations. And working together with the different organizations that are part of their consortium, they solve common problems across the world. A lot of them deal with crisis management, and it’s a big part of what they do, and it’s a big part of what they’re tailored to do. And they need reliable solutions that they can fire up super quickly. But as I said, they’re limited in terms of the staff and the resources that they have to do it.

I have to say that I’ve been in tech for a long time, almost up to my 20th year at Microsoft. And I’ve always been very, very excited about seeing what solutions like SharePoint can do for businesses to help them accomplish what they need to do. But I have to say I get even more excited when I think about how our solutions can really deliver and help people in their lives in the great needs that they have at any point in time.

So, we’ve got a video now that I’d like to show you that gives you a sense of what NetHope is doing with SharePoint and Office 365 online. Let’s roll the video, please.

(Break for NetHope video segment.)

KURT DELBENE: (Applause.) So to tell you a little bit more about what NetHope does with SharePoint and with Office 365, I’d like to invite Bill Brindley, who is the CEO of NetHope on stage to talk to us. Bill? (Applause.)

BILL BRINDLEY: Hi, Kurt.

KURT DELBENE: Thanks for being here.

BILL BRINDLEY: Thank you for having me.

KURT DELBENE: In the video we saw NetHope partner World Vision show how SharePoint Online was used to manage the process involving rebuilding Haiti following the earthquake.

BILL BRINDLEY: That’s right. And the earthquake is just one of dozens of programs that NetHope deals with all over the world. Not all, but many involve responding in crisis situations. And as you heard Frank point out, often in very extreme circumstances.

But what we found early on is that Office 365 can provide a unified, reliable platform for bringing those teams together, really up to 400,000 people, aid workers, all over the world working together around disasters and in other programs. So, the integration of SharePoint and Lync and so forth in terms of providing a unified platform for our teams is very exciting to us.

KURT DELBENE: That’s great to hear. And thanks for the great work that you do on behalf of all of us. As I’ve already shared with Bill, as part of this conference, Microsoft is going to make a donation of $50,000 to be distributed among the 33 partners that are part of NetHope. (Applause.)

We’re going to actually invite all of you. This is going to be a participative donation, if you will. And we’re going to invite all of you here at the SharePoint Conference to help us allocate the donation among the causes, the 33 causes, to find the one that you are passionate about.

And we’re going to use an application to actually, oddly enough, build on SharePoint Online and Azure. And so I’m going to invite Chris Johnson to come out and show us that application in a little bit more detail. But I’d like to thank, again, Bill, for the great work that his organization is doing and for their support of Office 365.

BILL BRINDLEY: Thank you.

KURT DELBENE: Thanks again, Bill. (Applause.)

BILL BRINDLEY: Thank you. Chris?

CHRIS JOHNSON: Well, thanks, Kurt. And welcome, everybody. As Kurt mentioned, we wanted everybody here to participate in helping us apportion how our donation is being made to NetHope. And so to do that, we’ve built a solution using Windows Azure, SQL Server, and SharePoint Online that I wanted to show you now.

The way you’re going to get to this application is by logging onto My PC Conference Portal through MSSharePointConference.com. You should all be familiar with that. It’s the same place that you go and build your schedule today.

After the keynote, there will be a vote link go live in the left-hand navigation that will take you to this website that you’re seeing now.

It basically lets you go and research each of the member organizations that NetHope helps support and find out information about each one. So, here I can go across and see a short description of each. I’ll pick World Vision here. And when I click through to it, I can get a longer description of the work that they do. I can also play the video that you saw earlier on, and we’re using HTML5 video to do this. But you can also log your vote. So, for example, if I say great org, and click vote now, my vote has been cast.

Now, pick carefully because you can only vote once. And you can’t go back and pick a different organization after you’ve cast your vote. So, like I say, fair warning.

Now, in the background, what we’re doing here is we’re logging this information into a SQL Azure database, and then we have a repetitive process that picks up these votes and pushes them off into SharePoint Online.

We wanted a way to visualize this data, and so we’ve built a dashboard in SharePoint Online that I want to show you now.

So, if I flip screens here — sorry, flip tabs here. This is the NetHope intranet. It’s deployed into SharePoint Online today and we’ve augmented this with a contribution sub site where we’ve built our dashboard.

So, if I show you the dashboard now, it basically is built up as a few different graphs to help us visualize this data. Obviously, all this data is fake at the moment for the purposes of this demo, but we’ll be wiping this out all after the keynote and starting to watch real-time data come in as you all vote.

Now, these charts are built using HTML5, JavaScript, and wrapped up as Web parts. We deployed them as a sandbox solution into SharePoint Online.

We used data access technologies like REST and the client-side object model to reach back into the list inside of SharePoint Online to pull out their data and chart it.

So, I want to change gears here and show you a little bit more about behind the scenes and how we did it. So, let’s take a look at this slide.

The solution’s in three main parts. The first thing we did was build a Web application using MVC and ASP.NET and deployed it on an Azure Web role. If you don’t know much about Azure, Azure allows you to build and host scalable Web applications in Microsoft datacenters around the world in very flexible ways.

The second part of the solution is what we call its worker role. And that’s the background process that periodically goes and picks up the votes from SQL Azure and moves them into SharePoint Online lists.

And then, finally, the SharePoint solution, which wraps up all of those chart Web parts and all the assets and so on that you deploy, that we deployed into SharePoint Online, like list definitions and content types and supporting assets like that.

So, let’s dip into Visual Studio and see what this looks like. So, over on the right-hand side, you can see the same solution that you saw on the slide, and basically it consists of the same projects. Here we have the Web role, which wraps up the things like the images and assets and JavaScript and CSS as part of that website. The worker role down on the bottom here, that’s the periodic process that moves the data across into SharePoint Online. And then finally, the third project, the SharePoint project, which defines some Web parts and list definitions that we’re going to move into SharePoint Online.

Now, Visual Studio makes it really easy to build these things, especially for SharePoint Online with its out-of-the-box support for building sandbox solutions.

Now, I’m going to hit F5 here, and we want to see this running. So, I’ll click F5. Now, this will all be running on my local dev box, but we are still pushing the vote data off into the real SharePoint Online website. You can see the same websites come up, and it’ll go through the same process again, pick World Vision, and vote.

Now, the first break point that I’ve preset, I’ve set three break points. The first is when the Web role is logging the vote data into the SQL Azure table. And here we’re just doing a simple insert. This is exactly the same as if you’re used to developing for our SQL on-prem, this is just logging a role into a SQL Azure table.

So, if I click F5 to continue, our vote has been cast, and the next breakpoint that’s hit is the worker role when it picks up those roles out of SQL Azure and pushes them off into SharePoint Online. And here we’re using the client-side object model, which is a remote API for SharePoint to do that. We gather up all of the information, we execute the query, and it goes off and pushes the row into a SharePoint list in the SharePoint Online site.

Now, there are a broad array of technologies and APIs that you can use to do this. The one I’m using today is the client-side object model, but you can also pick some things like our Web services or our REST end points to do this.

They’re all built on standards-based technology like XML, SOAP, and JCom, so they’re really interoperable from whatever system you want to call it from.

And then, finally, if I click F5 again, our last break point is simply us writing back to the database, again, to say that the vote has been written to SharePoint Online.

So, if I click F5 and continue, our vote has been written, and now if I move back over to the dashboard site and go take a look at the list that it’s being logged into, this is just a regular SharePoint list with thousands of rows of demo data right now. But what I’ve done is created a view over this list that’s just going to filter it down to my votes that have been cast.

And so I have that on the last tab over here. Right now, the list is blank. And if I refresh the list, we should see our vote turn up for World Vision with great org, and at this point, the chart Web parts use JavaScript and a combination of REST and the client-side object model to reach back into this list, pick up the data, and then visualize it in those charts we saw earlier.

Now, there are three things I’d like you to leave this demo with. It’s really the following: The first is that SharePoint Online might be surprisingly developer friendly for you. You should definitely go and take a look at it. It’s extensible with features like sandbox solutions that let you build rich applications using technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript today.

No. 2, SharePoint Online gives you the SharePoint that you already know and love, in the cloud, and today. We have a booth outside here, you can sign up for a free trial of Office 365, and I urge you to all go take a look at that.

And No. 3, consider building your next application with cloud services like Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and integrate them with your SharePoint applications whether they be on-prem or in SharePoint Online in the cloud.

After you leave the keynote and for the rest of the week, we have a couple of big screens set up in the expo hall where you can go and check out how the vote casting is going. We’ve got some charts up there, you can go check that out, and I urge you to all go and vote once the link goes live after the keynote. Thanks very much.

KURT DELBENE: Thanks, Chris.

CHRIS JOHNSON: Thank you. (Applause.)

KURT DELBENE: Please be sure to vote so that you can help us distribute the $50,000 donation to the causes that you’re most passionate about.

I think, for me, the thing that’s striking about that demo is the fact that it is all about the tools that you know and love today, whether that’s Visual Studio or SharePoint or the cloud service in Azure and moving those to the cloud and really having the same power that you have today in that cloud form.

So, that gets back to the original three elements of the strategy: Work on the devices that people know and love, create the cloud on your terms using the products you use today, but with a no-excuses cloud solution and continue to deliver this broad platform of capabilities that is necessarily to really allow you to bet on us for your infrastructure.

So, I’ve spent most of my time talking about Office 365, but hopefully that gives you a sense of our strategy overall.

I did want to leave you with a few kind of key points in terms of thinking about the cloud. As I said, the customers that I talked to are at various points in their migration to the cloud. We certainly love and will continue to support for the interminable future on-premises products that we know and love and your deployments on-premises. But if you’re considering moving to the cloud, or even if you’re not, we’d encourage you to give it a trial. We have a 30-day trial subscription that you just go up and you can sign up for. You can talk to your account managers about how to best do that.

Generally, think about the cloud as part of your strategy and evaluate your readiness overall. That can be starting, as I said, starting a conversation with your account manager, talk to a partner. We’ve got some 4,000 different systems integration partners that are here represented today and they’d love to have a conversation with you as well.

And then based on where you think you are and how it integrates in your plans, really start putting the wheels in motion thinking through the basic strategy and the plan to get you there.

So, that’s it. I hope you have a great time the next four days. Celebrate the success that we’ve had together with SharePoint and I want to give you a sense the future is as rich for SharePoint as the past has been, and we are excited to continue to partner with you on that future. Thank you very much. I’m going to bring Jared back out to wrap things up. Thank you. (Applause, music.)

JARED SPATARO: You know, when we introduced SharePoint 2010 two years ago, we didn’t really know exactly what to expect. As I said before, we hoped that you would like it, and we really dreamed that you would take it and go and do amazing things with it. As you can see today, you really have.

I think that NetHope is just one example of the ways in which our customers and our partners, you, are really changing the world in a very profound way with SharePoint, and we appreciate your work and look forward, as Kurt said, to a very bright future.

So, I hope that over the course of the next week, these next four days here, that we will hear many of you saying, “I didn’t know SharePoint could do that.” There’s a lot of surface area to the product in the 240 sessions that we have designed for you, to help you understand what you can do.

As Jeff mentioned, we designed the product to challenge the status quo, and we hope that each of you will challenge your own status quo as you look at what more you can do with SharePoint in your organization.

Kurt’s remarks may have you thinking about Office 365 and the cloud. I just want to emphasize that there is so much value there already. And in addition to the value that’s there, we are committed to continually updating that service. In particular, the announcement that we made around BCS, Business Connectivity Services, and the addition of that feature to Office 365, we think will open up whole new scenarios for the types of solutions that you can build in the cloud. We’d encourage you to take a look at it.

So, before we go, I wanted to remind you that as we wrap up the conference at the end of the week, we still love to hear from you, and we want to make sure that you know that there are many ways to stay in touch with us. First, you can certainly visit our website at SharePoint.Microsoft.com. You can join our Facebook group where we do periodic things like a live chat. And then you can also follow us on Twitter.

I hope that each one of you have a wonderful time at the conference. In particular, I hope I get to meet each one of you, that’s a lot of people as we’re pushing so many folks, but there will be wonderful opportunities. I’m sure that we will see each other out and about.

And I almost forgot one last thing. Many people have actually asked me, hey, Jared, are you doing another SharePoint Conference? I thought I’d take a moment to respond: Absolutely, baby! We’re not going to have a party this big and so we’re going to do it next year, but in a different place. Next year, we’re going to take you to a place that combines the sophistication of Paris with the bright lights of New York City and the mystique of the far east, let’s roll that video, please.

(Video segment.)

END