Editor’s note — Oct. 20, 2009 —
A sentence previously omitted from the original transcript — about the possibility of bringing the wonders of SharePoint even to the consumer market — has been reinserted into the text below.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Microsoft Senior Director of SharePoint, Tom Rizzo. (Applause.)

TOM RIZZO: Welcome to SharePoint Conference 2009. What did you think of the video? Did people like it? (Cheers, applause.) Yeah! It’s a huge, huge conference.

A little fun fact about that video: When you saw us driving through Las Vegas, the cameraman was actually on top of the car. (Laughter.) And when we saw the police, he jumped down. So, we made sure we didn’t get caught there.

There’s lots of energy. I was in and out in the exhibit hall last night. I saw all the people out there, excited about the SharePoint Conference: customers, partners. I’m really excited to be here, and hopefully you’re excited to be here. We’ve got a great lineup for the week.

I’m a little bit of a filler. The real talent is Steve Ballmer, Jeff Teper, and, of course, SharePoint 2010. So, give me five minutes, let me clear a couple of slides, and then we’ll get to the show.

First, I need to thank our premier sponsor, Quest Software. They’re over in the partner pavilion. Make sure you stop by, take a look at some of the great solutions they have built on top of SharePoint.

I also want to thank AvePoint, our keynote sponsor. Again, they’re also in the pavilion. Go take a look at it.

And finally, we’ve got some great demos for you today. We’re running those on some HP hardware. So, I wanted to thank HP. I think you’re going to be blown away by what you see today across those demos, everything from the site technologies, community, search. We’re blowing it all out today with SharePoint 2010.

Now, who are you? Where are you from? Over 7,400 attendees. I’ve worked on the last three SharePoint Conferences The last one we had in Seattle, we had about 3,800 people, so we’ve grown by almost 100 percent. It’s just amazing to see the sea of people here excited about SharePoint and excited about the things they can build on top of it.

There are over 70 countries represented here today, so great global representation, everywhere from New Zealand to Hawaii and everywhere in-between. So, definitely connect with other people worldwide to understand what they’re working on with SharePoint.

One hundred sixty five sponsors. They’re also exhibiting. We have partners presenting. The 18 customers, so folks like General Mills or Deloitte & Touche or Electronic Arts. So, it’s a great opportunity for you to go to a customer session and learn what other customers are doing, get best practices, engage with them, ask them questions, really understand in terms of a birds-of-a-feather way with other customers, what they’re doing on top of SharePoint.

Last, but not least, we’re sold out. So, you’re a lucky few. There are a bunch of people on the wait list hoping to get in. I saw a couple people trying to scalp tickets downstairs. So, if you want to make some money, you can give your ticket over to them if you want. But I probably wouldn’t do that.

My STC, I’ve got to do a little sell job, make sure to go to My STC it’s your one-stop shop for all your conference information. Plan your schedule with a session browser. There are 240 sessions. You won’t be able to attend each one, but one of the things we made sure of is that 24 to 48 hours afterwards, you will have an on-demand video of those sessions. They’re up in the session browser, so don’t worry about scurrying to each session. You can definitely go take a look at the videos afterwards, and even after the conference.

We are investing in a lot of community features. There are webcams so make sure to take your picture, update your profile. I saw the wall of people who already started to do that. You can associate key words with yourself. We have people search, so you can find people with expertise. Maybe you’re interested in Web content management, maybe you’re interested in collaboration. You can find other people who have those similar interests.

Finally, we’ve partnered with the user groups worldwide so you can associate yourself with user groups. So, if you’re from the Chicago SharePoint user group, go and associate yourself with that user group and you’ll find all the other people from the user group and connect with other user groups worldwide.

One of our most popular events is Ask the Experts. It’s usually packed. We have tons and tons of experts from Microsoft, from our partners, even some customers there answering questions around SharePoint 2010. It’s Wednesday night. There’s a Rock Band competition, so get out your inner Huey Lewis and compete. Tons of great prizes, it’s also a great opportunity to check out the exhibit hall.

Some fun facts and figures before we get started. You saw some of these in the video. There are over 300 hours of new content on SharePoint 2010, 240 sessions, over 45 hours of hands-on labs. Make sure you head over to the hands-on lab machines, you can try out all of the new features in SharePoint 2010. You’re getting the first look of the product, so definitely take advantage of it.

Seven-point-five miles of network cable; ironically, that’s for the wireless network. (Laughter.) Thank you, thank you very much, I’m here all week, folks.

The other thing, too, two sets of people are getting married here. We’re in Vegas, right? Congratulations. (Applause.)

This is an easy crowd, thank you. And then last, but not least, this is the biggest beach party that Mandalay has ever had, so let’s blow it out on Tuesday night with Huey Lewis.

Now, a little bit more on a serious note. Thank you for attending the conference. Thank you for betting your businesses on SharePoint. You’ve partnered with us throughout the years that we’ve been in the SharePoint business. So I want to thank you for that. You know, I’ve personally worked with SharePoint on and off for the last ten years. I was there in the beginning around Tahoe and I’ve been here since 2007 on. And it’s been amazing to see the growth of the product from a customer and partner standpoint.

I’ve seen all the passion that you’ve put into the product, the solutions you’ve built. So we’ve put together a little video that captures some of the great examples of great sites built on SharePoint. So enjoy the conference, enjoy the video, and enjoy SharePoint 2010. Thank you very much.

(Video segment.)

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the state Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: Well, thanks. It’s a real honor for me to have a chance to be here with you today. I was talking to the guys backstage and I said, is it really true that I’ve never done a SharePoint Conference before? And they say, “Steve, this is one of the last things that you get to assume the mantle from Bill Gates on.” He’s done every SharePoint Conference. And I have to say I just pump energy at the thought of doing this conference because SharePoint, I have to say, these days is one of my favorite products at Microsoft, and it is a pleasure to be with you. Yes, that’s a key theme. Applause lines at the SharePoint Conference.

But I really am excited to have a chance to be here with you today, talk a little bit about how we’re thinking about the world and where we’re going and hopefully give you a little bit of context that’s useful as you start out the week.

I will say the SharePoint crowd is an enthusiastic crowd. This is already my fourth event of the morning. You say, “How is that possible?” Well, I started the morning at about 6:15, 5:45 actually. I went out running. And I’m running back to Mandalay. And eight people swoop in on me and they say, “Are you Steve? You are, aren’t you?” And I’m really scared, and I say, “Yes.” And they say, “We’re SharePoint runners, can we have our picture taken with you?” All right, SharePoint runners.

I come back and there’s a SharePoint breakfast that I go to. SharePoint starts early. And last, but not least, the piece de resistance, I see people here today, there are friends from my old elementary school. And the SharePoint crowd is enthusiastic.

So I hope these opening remarks give you a little bit of context and I’ll try to build from that.

I normally, in the last year, have had to start almost every speech talking about the economy. I’m not going to do that today. I’m going to remind you of one thing, and one thing alone. At the end of the day, the only thing that’s going to continue to enable growth and prosperity is advances in productivity and innovation, and the IT industry is going to propel a lot of that. Not only inside IT, but for the things that everybody in this room has a chance to do to help propel the organizations, the businesses in which they are a part.

Certainly, as we look forward over the next five, the next ten years, the chance to transform the world through technology is as great today as any time, certainly since I’ve been at Microsoft, which is almost 30 years now. The evolution as we move from a world that’s predominately the PC, staring at the data center or at the Internet, to a world in which information is available on the PC, the phone, the big screen, the TV. And we bring together the world of enterprise or data center computing and the world of the Internet into so-called cloud computing. That’s a major transformation. And it will enable us, if we also build the right new user interfaces — not just mouse and graphics and keyboards, but voice and speech and touch and natural language — if we bring that all together, we have the opportunity to change the way people live at home, the way they work, the way they collaborate, the information that they get.

I was backstage waiting to be introduced, and it turns out that there’s somebody with a video feed that’s being shot this way that’s capturing the audience from your backs. You might say, “Why is that interesting?” Because from your backs, we can see how many of you have digital screens illuminated. And it turns out, the answer is not very many. Because we still need to evolve technology so that it’s even more natural to bring a digital device to a meeting like this, to make notes on the device, to collaborate with colleagues, and in real time say, hey, look, this made sense, this didn’t. Boom. That annotation is automatically linked to the video, it’s propagated to the SharePoint site where you’re posting stuff from this conference. It’s just some of the kinds of improvements that we can continue to drive over the next three, four, five, ten years through information technology.

So I think it’s a very exciting time, and frankly from a Microsoft perspective, SharePoint is at the center of it. A lot of what people want to do is about sharing information, finding information, getting insight out of information. Figuring out various structured and in unstructured ways to act on information. And as much or more as anything that we’re doing at Microsoft, boom, SharePoint is the center of that innovation. Whether it’s SharePoint on the corporate intranet, SharePoint facing the Internet, or SharePoint really living out in the cloud. SharePoint is at the center of it.

So as we have a chance at this conference today to announce that we’ll make the public beta of SharePoint 2010 available in November, I think you’ll see a lot of not only great things for today, but the potential for so many great, new scenarios in the future in the SharePoint product.

And it’s not just SharePoint the server or SharePoint in the cloud, but I’m also particularly excited about what we’re doing with the new SharePoint workspace client application in Office 2010. This is a successor to the Groove technology that really gives you rich client capabilities to take SharePoint information offline, to work on it on an airplane or over slow links. I think it will really dramatically extend and improve the degree to which people are getting full advantage out of the SharePoint technology not only through the browser, but also with rich client assist. So, in November, both SharePoint 2010 and all of the Office infrastructure, the Office front end, including SharePoint Work Space will be available in beta tests.

We’ve already had about 5,000 people in private tests testing SharePoint. We’ve had over 100,000 testers outside of Microsoft using Office 2010, but we’re delighted to be able to open the beta up and we’ll be in position then in the first half of next year to release SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 to the market as a whole.

So I’m going to capture some of the things that we’re thinking about in SharePoint 2010. Tom’s going to join me, and we’re going to show you a few demonstrations of those capabilities at work.

I want to talk about something which is kind of an unusual thing to do at a SharePoint conference. But what is SharePoint? This is still a question I get asked often when I’m out visiting customers. What is SharePoint? Is it a collaboration system? Yes. Is it a business insight system? Yes. Is it a social networking system? Sure. Work flow? You bet. Document management? Yes.

So we try to create these category names. Is it a business collaboration platform? Well, someday we want to bring the wonders of SharePoint even to the consumer market. Some of the things you do with SharePoint even extend beyond collaboration in some senses as we add search, as we add insights and the ability to really build a platform for business intelligence.

But SharePoint, in my estimation, it’s kind of magical in a certain way. It’s really a special kind of a product. And I don’t think directly there’s anything in the market that’s trying to do in as holistic a fashion, as integrated a fashion, and as comprehensive a fashion what we’re trying to do in SharePoint. And because of the extensibility and programmability of SharePoint, it really becomes a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that before were all served by special or niche or custom-developed applications.

The capability spans from hosting sites for individuals, communities, content management and content publishing, search, portal and business intelligence and insight. And with SharePoint 2010, we’re going to increase the capabilities for compositing, mash-up, rapid application development and other forms of extensibility.

SharePoint 2010 brings new capabilities, particularly it will bring a new user interface to SharePoint. Will take the concepts of Office 2010, the ribbon, back stage, the Web application companions and really integrate them into the SharePoint environment. We’ll move to provide better support for multiple browser, for SharePoint on phones, all the while focusing in not only on the core mission of connecting and empowering people with one another and people with information, but because we have this sort of magical unified infrastructure, we let you consolidate workloads and consolidate costs.

The amount of software people and businesses have been buying for document management, for business intelligence, for enterprise search, those are all separate purchases, separate infrastructure to manage, separate cost bases. We really let you bring those together in a very, very I think cost-effective way. Sure, there are a lot of issues in getting there that many of the people in this room have faced, and yet, SharePoint, because of its unique in the market focus on integration and integration of information and people, has a special role to play.

What are we trying to do in addition? We’re trying to help you very rapidly respond to business needs. Things are happening very quickly. We know you’re all under pressure, particularly in these economic times, to reduce costs. And yet, the businesses in which you operate are still going to say to you, hey, look, we need to make sure that we have new applications, we’re handling new scenarios. You’re not going to be given leeway, despite tough budgets, to do less.

And we think SharePoint is really a product that can help you get more done with less than almost any other solution that permits this kind of collaboration and rapid application development that’s on the market today.

Jeff Teper is going to speak after this, and he’s going to talk about some of the improvements we’re making in SharePoint from the user interface perspective. In terms of personal site, social networking and community, Jeff will show you. He’ll talk about where we’re going in document management, records management, workflow, search, portal, business intelligence.

I want to talk, though, about three big evolutions that are independent of that. Number one, I want to talk about this notion of compositing and rapid application development. SharePoint started out very focused in on end-user applications, and being an end-user application. And increasingly and particularly in SharePoint ’10, you see us increase the amount of technology that gives you the tools and even gives you end users the tools to mash up, to customize, to personalize SharePoint in some strong ways.

I want to talk a little bit about the move from SharePoint being something that you host yourself to something that we’ll host for you in the cloud through SharePoint Online. And the initial focuses of the SharePoint releases have really focused in on intranet scenarios. And with SharePoint 2010, we let you handle very strongly both intranet and Internet-facing Web sites. So, three key changes, if you will, in the overall SharePoint strategy that are really enabled and pushed to a new level by SharePoint 2010.

Starting with this notion of rapidly responding to business needs through new technologies that let end users and developers program SharePoint 2010, here’s just a set of examples of some of the kinds of applications that you could do with SharePoint 2010: pricing analysis, hiring processes, conference planning, delivery scheduling, some of my favorites from customers I’ve visited.

We’ve got a lot of work that we’ve been doing with people on citizen management, keeping track of citizens, building citizen portals in these kinds of technologies. Project tracking. Sales reporting. My own personal SharePoint site that I put in place has all of the documents and schedules and key financial reports that the senior leadership at Microsoft needs.

And the ability not only to have developers or IT staff do the customizations that build these applications, but with some of the new tools, the ability to let end users themselves create custom SharePoint solutions is quite high.

With SharePoint 2010, we’re improving the developer tool. For end users who want to do compositing and mash up, SharePoint designers, Microsoft Access and Access Services for SharePoint will now let a developer or an end user create a database application and publish it through SharePoint.

Our InfoPath form services for SharePoint and InfoPath, which is built into Microsoft Office, again, will allow end users to create a set of applications. And some of you will say, hey, end users in my company can’t do this. And I’ll say, some probably can. But we’re getting simpler and simpler for people to create their own custom SharePoint application.

Rapid application development using Visual Studio and SQL. Tom’s going to show you the enhancements we’ve made to Visual Studio to really support SharePoint development. I know that’s been an area of a lot of feedback, shall we say, from the SharePoint community. I hope you’ll like what you see today.

Enhanced extensibility. Business connectivity services to allow you to get from SharePoint into business data. We’ll show you what we’ve done. New sandbox solutions. New APIs to access workflows, UI, and the core platform. Data APIs, client-object models, Silverlight, a bunch of things that we’ve done to improve the overall extensibility. And last but not least, a broader embrace and support for standards, accessibility standards, and the like. (Applause.) A lot of work to improve SharePoint as a place for you to rapidly respond to business needs with a set of compositing and rapid application development tools that we think are really getting to be very impressive.

Tom Rizzo is going to come on stage now. We’re going to do a little demonstration for you and show some of the ways that you can use the new tools and the new services to rapidly respond to business needs with SharePoint 2010. Welcome Tom back on stage. (Applause.)

TOM RIZZO: Thank you, Steve. All right, I’m going to show you some developer productivity enhancements across all the different aspects of SharePoint.

But before I jump into the developer pieces, we’ll see a couple of things here. Number one, line of business connectivity using the new BCS or Business Connectivity Services, next generation of the business data catalog, read, write, tons of integration with Office, you’re going to see exciting stuff.

Second, I’ll show you around the developer productivity with Visual Studio 2010. For those of you who haven’t heard, we shipped beta 2.0 today of Visual Studio 2010. It’s available on MSDN. Go and download it, just don’t download it right now, wait for the keynote to end and then try it back in your room.

And the last bit I’ll show you is around what Steve talked about, sandbox solutions. So, deployment online, on premises, swaddling, really making SharePoint productive for developers but also governed and managed by IT.

So let’s get started. First, I want to talk about BCS, the Business Connectivity Services. Here you see SQL Server Management Studio, hopefully you’re all used to the user interface for SQL Server Management Studio. I’ve got a database here of just customers. So, you see Alfred’s of England at the top, and then I have a bunch of different customers here. We’re going to go connect this database to SharePoint.

Now I’m going to fire up SharePoint Designer. For those of you who haven’t heard of SharePoint Designer, we made it free back in April of this year. So, if you aren’t downloading and using SharePoint Designer, learn it, live it, love it. You own it if you own SharePoint, and that will continue in SharePoint 2010. We will continue to make SharePoint Designer free.

This is the new SharePoint Designer 2010. Let me just orient you a little bit to the new user interface. Number one, SharePoint Designer gets the ribbon. So now you get a contextual ribbon across all the things that you want to create in SharePoint Designer from workloads to customizing sites, just working with your SharePoint environment is much easier in SharePoint Designer.

The other thing too, as you see, we’ve changed the navigation so it’s not a folder-based navigation anymore. It actually will do SharePoint artifacts. We try and group them based on the way that you work. So here, you see this new capability called external content type. I’m going to click in there, and this is just the Business Connectivity Services showing up inside of SharePoint Designer.

I’m going to go and create what’s called a new external content type. This external content type actually won’t be back in SharePoint. So, I would enable my external content type, and I’ll put in customer here. And watch. I can connect this system to SharePoint to Office without any code at all. Here I’m just going to select that I want to map the properties to an Outlook contact. And then we even support taking that LLB system offline so that you can work with it offline in SharePoint Work Space. So, tons of great integration here.

And then I’m going to go browse for my data source. You see the same list of tables that you saw in SQL Server Management Studio. Here’s my customers table. I’ll right-click, again, no code, and go create all operations.

Now, SharePoint Designer is going to go to that back-end system. It’s going to look at the data source. It’s going to query what’s there. And it’s going to pop up a Wizard to ask me what I want to do. I’m going to go and take the company name that’s in the database and to map it to Office. I just go and select the Outlook contact properties. So if you’ve seen Outlook contact properties, these are just the contact properties from the Outlook client. I’ll map this to the full name inside of Outlook, and then I’ll do show and picker, so I can go and select this inside of my picker. I can set up a filter. And in about five clicks, you’re going to see SharePoint Designer right here is going to create the CRUD operation — create, read, update, delete — and even enumerate.

Now let’s go use this. I’m going to go pop into my SharePoint site. You’ll see I have this customer list. We have a new type of list inside of SharePoint called an external list. When I click on this list, it’s using the BCS model to go talk to that back-end SQL Server database. It looks exactly to your end users like just a SharePoint list. And it’s got the functionality that you want.

So here I can come to country and I can filter, let’s say just by Germany, so boom, all just Germany, what do you think of that? Pretty good, right? Pretty good. (Applause.) Pretty easy. Now, of course I can go edit this in the browser with SharePoint, use InfoPath form services, create rich forms. But lots of times your end users are clamoring, make my LLB systems better, make my databases better, make my Web services better. Surface it in a client that I know. And that client is Office.

And so you’ll see here, I’ve got everyone’s favorite e-mail client, Microsoft Outlook. This also does work in Word as well as SharePoint Work Space. You see Outlook’s got this new external list technology built into it. And when I click into this marketing customer list, you see contact cards of that database system. So, my end user thinks they’re just looking at Outlook contact cards.

You have the full functionality of Outlook for contacts. I can go map an address, do follow-up, categorize the contacts. I can even edit this database right inside of Outlook.

So let me go back. It’s not Alfred’s of England anymore, it’s Alfred’s of Sweden. Let me hit Save, so my end users don’t even know that they’re editing a database. But wait. To show you we’re in Vegas, so you may think it’s all smoke and mirrors, let me go back to SQL Server Management Studio. You see Alfred’s of England. Let me just hit F5, bam. Alfred’s of Sweden. You like it? You like it? All right. (Applause.)

And then to show you completely this Alfred’s of England, I’ll go back into the external list. I’ll hit F5, post it back up, and you see Alfred’s of Sweden. So, really quickly, you saw now code, BCS connecting to the database, going into SharePoint, going into Office.

Of course we also support Visual Studio. Let me turn to Visual Studio now and talk a little bit about some of the developer productivity.

So here’s the new Visual Studio 2010. We worked really hard with the Visual Studio team to build some great tools into Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint. We heard you loud and clear that you wanted to be super productive developing on the SharePoint platform. So, I’m going to go and create a new project inside of Visual Studio. You’ll see a whole new list of templates built right into Visual Studio for SharePoint. Everything from creating site definitions to content types to BCS models to workflow to even now visual Web parts.

So no more hand coding of Web parts, right? No more hand coding of Web parts. (Applause.) We also heard that you want to do application life cycle management, so by just clicking on the box down here, I can add it to my source control. Use Team Foundation Server, do all of my team development now between Visual Studio and SharePoint.

Now it’s popping up. I’m going to go build on my Windows 7 box here. So give it a couple seconds to set up the environment, and I’ll orient you to the environment here. But this is all on Windows 7, remember, this is all on Windows 7.

So a couple things about the Visual Studio environment. If you’re a developer, you’re used to the server explorer, we can go browse your databases, go browse your event viewer inside of Windows. Integrated right now is also SharePoint. So you don’t have to jump into the browser to understand what’s in your SharePoint environment. You just come to the server explorer, click through, you can see all your different content types inside of there and get the properties of them. You can see your lists and libraries, you can see your workflows. So, again, making you super productive in the Visual Studio environment.

If we move over to the right here, you’ll see in the solution explorer, we’ve customized the solution explorer for SharePoint features and SharePoint packages. So, again, one-stop shopping for you to do all of your different capabilities inside of the SharePoint environment, from creating features to packaging those features.

Now normally, you’d have to go and hand code XML to create the feature or hand-code the package. Visual Studio has designers built right in. So, we have graphical designers that will pop up and help you along. So if you want to take this feature and put it at a different scope, whether it’s the farm, the site, the Web, the Web app, you just go into Visual Studio and click. You can also add items to the solution seamlessly, right? It’s really a great development environment and makes you super productive.

Okay, I’ve blabbered enough. Let’s start writing some code and designing some Web parts. Now, this is not going to be the prettiest Web part you’ve ever seen. I’m designing it on stage here. But let’s pop into the visual designer. Let’s go over to our toolbox and now with our Web part, we can just drag and drop. I want a button. Visual Studio puts down a button. I want a label or a checkbox. Let’s throw in a checkbox there. I have a checkbox. I want to maybe throw on a label here and clean it up a bit, I put that on there, and then maybe an image.

Now there’s a couple things I can go in here and say make this checkbox — we’re going to write a bad Web part. Now, none of you have ever written a bad Web part, right? You write perfect code every time? Liars. All of you. So, I’m just going to change up to make them good. We’re going to turn the Web part from a bad Web part into a good Web part.

One of the other productivity enhancements we did in Visual Studio is lots of times people want to associate images to their Web parts and place them inside of there, but they want that deployed to SharePoint. Well, Visual Studio has this new capability called mapped folders. You can take your folders in the file system, map them, and then send that up to SharePoint so you can use relative URLs directly inside of SharePoint.

So you see Visual Studio added this image to this folder. I’m going to go and add some existing items into this map folder. And you see I got two here. If I go into my pictures library, I’ve got two images, a thumbs down and a thumbs up. And now they’re inside of Visual Studio. I can go to my image here, select my image URL and the properties and bring up a properties dialogue and select my thumbs-down image to map.

And you’ll see the relative URL down here to layout, right, all that sort of stuff. Visual Studio is going to pick it up and actually deploy it to my SharePoint environment.

Now, you want to see some code too. So let me double click behind the button. And we’re going to mess a little bit with threading. I’m going to do a using system dot threading inside of here. IT people, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous. Now, you don’t want to see me type stuff here. I’m going to use code snippet inside of Visual Studio. It’s very simple code. All we do is take the date, time, we use the thread, we tell it to sleep five seconds to emulate a bad-behaving Web part. And then when we click the button. I’m going to put another little code snippet down here to just change the image so you can see my layouts, images, Visual Studio, projects, all this sort of stuff.

Now let me warm up the environment a little bit. Let me go and deploy this, and you’re going to see it’s going to do a couple things. Now, one of the other big features that we heard that you wanted is great. You write your code, you’ve got team development, you want to go in and you want one-click deploy and debug.

And before, you’d probably have to go through ten different steps. You’d have to go into Web.config and set up Web.config. And you’d have to go and deploy your solution and then you’d have to go activate the feature and then you’d have to do — duh, di, duh, di, duh, di, duh, right? There’s like a thousand steps that you have to actually go through.

With Visual Studio 2010, adding into the productivity, we can now just set a break point here, and then we can go off and actually deploy this. So, let me just come up and bring up my output window so you can see what’s actually happening inside of Visual Studio. And I’m just going to hit F5 and take my hands off the keyboard. And you’ll see here, it’s going off, it’s going to deactivate the feature if the features are already there. It’s going to go and retract the solution if it’s already there. It’s going to go and add the solution inside of there. It’s resolving any conflicts that I have. It’s going to go up now and land me on a create Web part page because it realized I want to be able to debug that Web part, so I have to be able to place that Web part on a page in order to debug it.

So, again, about 20 different steps that you would have to do previously, now Visual Studio has automated all that for you inside of the user interface. So, isn’t that good? You like that? (Applause.)

OK. I’m just going to put test up here, do my full page here. Now, one of the other things when it comes to debugging is that – and I’m going to create my Web part page – is that you also want diagnostics. So, not all the time do you want to maybe on your production system go and debug your code, you want kind of an X-ray into your system here. So, let’s just create the Web page here.

I’m going to go add the Web part. You’ll see our new Web part insert UI. So, we try to streamline inserting Web parts. So, you’re seeing a new user interface inside of here. I can go and find my custom Web part. I see visual Web part one, and I’ll just add it to the page. Now, it’s going to take a little bit, we have the five-second delay, I’m out of jokes, so let’s just wait for it to come up here, but you’re going to see some new X-ray technology. We call it the developer dashboard. So, you see my thumb’s down. You see this kind of funny thing on the bottom here. Built into SharePoint 2010 is a developer dashboard. Now, this doesn’t just have to be for developers. This can be for IT pros as well.

If I zoom in, you’ll see that visual Web part one on pre-render, it took the five seconds and another second to actually render. So, I can work with the developer as an IT pro, I can say, “Hey, what’s taking so long on this actual page?” You scroll up, you’ll see the database calls that SharePoint made on your behalf to SQL Server, so the stored procedures that we called. And then even with the developer dashboard I can go see the call stack over here of all the things that SharePoint calls. So, I really have a great diagnostic into the system to understand what’s happening inside of there with the developer dashboard. (Cheers, applause.)

Now let’s make them good, because we like good Web parts. Let’s click our button, and bam, immediately into debugging. And, of course, I can step into, look, do all my watch variables, do the immediate window, take a look at all my things inside of here. I’m just going to let it run. And now let’s make them good, because we like this Web part. Let’s click our button, and bam!, immediately into debugging. And, of course, I can step into, look through all my variables, through the media windows, take look at all my things, and decide that I’m going to let it run. And now we’re a great Web part. I scroll back down, see the pay off down here. I’ll zoom back to see the off-screen render. I fixed my code problem. You can clap. It’s OK. It’s all right. Develop the dashboard, develop a productivity.

OK, last part of the demo, standby solutions. We heard also that you wanted to allow developers to write code. But from an IT standpoint, you wanted governance, you wanted to understand what they were writing, you wanted to be able to follow that code. One of the things we invested in is something called Sandbox solutions, and Sandbox solutions fit right inside Visual Studio. Often you can upload them to your on-premises box, but we also support the same technology as SharePoint Online. So, I’m showing you SharePoint Online here, the Microsoft hosted service.

I’m going to go and upload an event receiver here that I created earlier to SharePoint Online. So, remember, this runs on-premises and online. You see the UI, this is the Sandbox solution. As an IT person, you can assign server quotas, and throttle these Sandbox solutions. We’ll track for the SharePoint PCU usage, memory usage, database calls. So that if a developer writes an infinite loop inside their code, we’ll kill it off, we’ll track that server resource usage, and we’ll stop running that code until you can fix the problem. So, complete control for you as an IT person.

You like that. OK, go ahead, go ahead. (Applause.) And then, I’m going to go and upload the solution here, and a couple of things. We fully support the Web solution package formatting, so it’s a common package formatting between SharePoint Designer and also Visual Studio, so you can upsize your applications between the two tools. Here’s my simple event receiver. And once I upload it, I have to activate it at the farm level. So, I’m just going to go and activate it. IT gave me permission to do that. And now I can use that farm solution across all my different sites. So, I’m going to go and activate this feature inside of my sites. And there we go, it’s activated. Now, let’s go use it.

Again, simple application, lots of heavy lifting behind here. So, we made a check the weather application here. I can go in and selection here, go and edit the list item. You’ll see that the photo is not filled out. Our event receiver will see what place we select, and then we’ll fill out the photo, and the image viewer will pop at the bottom of the page.

Now, I can go see what the weather is in Redmond, but it’s always rainy and cloudy, and it’s a waste of a click. So, let’s go to Vegas, and let’s go see if our event receiver fires in SharePoint Online. And, partly cloudy. Partly cloudy.

But, you know what, there’s something that’s very special happening in Vegas. There is a city within a city, I like to say. It’s called the SharePoint Conference. And, guess what, when I hit save, it’s always sunny at the SharePoint Conference. (Applause.)

Yes, so three things you saw. Line of business connectivity, whether that’s database, your LLB systems, or Web services through the business connectivity services, with complete integration into Office; developer productivity with Visual Studio 2010; and then deployment on-prem or online with Sandbox Solutions.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: We thought we’d go right to the most technical, geekiest demo right from the get-go. (Applause.) The end-user features, they’ll show up later in Jeff’s speech, but I just love that stuff.

I want to pick up on a theme that Tom was showing and talking about at the end, which is one of these big transformations from end user to end user plus developer and compositing, and from on-premise to the cloud. It’s certainly all in the newspapers, the cloud, the cloud, the world is about the cloud. And we certainly agree about that. We do think you’re going to have mixed environments for many years to come, with a lot of your IT infrastructure running in your data centers and on-premise. But you’re going to want to move things at varying speeds to the cloud. Maybe you would move, for example, team sites, or my sites would move to the cloud more quickly. But certain custom line of business applications you might want to move more slowly.

SharePoint Online is the name of the service that we operate that provides you SharePoint Services in the cloud. We have today over a million users signed up for SharePoint Online. We have over 7,000 partners working with us with SharePoint Online. We’re updating SharePoint Online quarterly with new capabilities. We’ve got very large customers, like GlaxoSmithKline, who will move 100,000 SharePoint users to the cloud. We have companies like Ingersoll-Rand with 60,000 users that also uses SharePoint on-premise for their Internet facing site, but will use SharePoint Online in the cloud.

Our cloud solution, SharePoint Online, is designed to give you choice. Not only can you run some things on-premise, and other things in the cloud, but you can mix and match between the two environments. Maybe you don’t want to move your line of business data to the cloud, and you want to run BCS connectivity on-premise, and then run a part of your SharePoint environment in the cloud. It works.

With SharePoint 2010, we’re providing a much greater depth of features in the cloud. So you get almost all of the end user capabilities in SharePoint 2010 in the cloud, and you will get a range of developer features. You won’t get all of the full trust APIs in the cloud, but you will get a very robust Sandbox environment in the cloud that can work quite, quite well.

So, we’re talking about technologies which are already today being proven. We’re talking about a level of depth of capability in the cloud that is unsurpassed with SharePoint 2010, and about a world in which you have choice between SharePoint Online in the cloud, and SharePoint Server on premise for distributing functionality.

I think this is going to be an area of explosive opportunity for we and you together. The number of cases where you’re trying to create a collaborative environment between your company and suppliers, and customers and business partners, where the right solution may be to move to the cloud; cases where you don’t want to build the infrastructure yourself, you want to let us do it. You can move those things, and exploit so much more of the capability of SharePoint so much more quickly than ever before.

We’re committed with SharePoint in the cloud to a very high level of reliability and high availability. We have years of working with you on an enterprise basis. We know the kinds of demands you have for reliability, security, and availability. And with SharePoint Online in the cloud, we’re committed to that same standard of excellence that you hold us to for your on-premise implementation.

The third theme I talked about really relates to using SharePoint for Internet-facing sites. I talked to our team. I said, we’ve got to be real careful about the language we use, because SharePoint Online, SharePoint in the cloud, that’s all very Internet-oriented. Putting SharePoint in the cloud is still different than using SharePoint to build Internet sites as opposed to intranet sites. And with SharePoint 2010, we focused on a set of capabilities for both so that you can run intranet and Internet-style applications, and you can run them on-premise, with a hoster, or in the cloud. And we’re going to facilitate all of those opportunities and options for you.

We have a lot of customers using SharePoint in Internet sites, and with the capabilities of 2010, we expect to see that explode. But it wasn’t the initial design point for SharePoint. The companies like Viacom, Hawaiian Airlines, Kroeger, the Marines, Ferrari, Conservation International, the Library of Congress, Pfizer, all of those organizations have built Internet-facing Web sites using SharePoint as the core infrastructure.

There’s a lot of reasons why SharePoint is a great infrastructure for Internet-facing sites, and we advance the technologies in all of these areas. Our toolkits do include very nice Web content management and multimedia, and multilingual capabilities. We can facilitate end user publishing without direct IT involvement, and for many dynamic Internet-facing Web sites that’s super-important.

Collaboration and community is increasingly an important part of many Internet-facing Web sites. Let me give you a couple of examples of companies that have done work with SharePoint that face the Internet. The first is Kraft. Kraft Foods has consolidated over 200 Web sites at a savings of about $2 million a year, into one SharePoint-based infrastructure.

This is a top thousand Web site in the U.S. They get 100 million page views a month, and it’s a super-important, mission critical marketing tool in the Kraft system, as Kraft is a very consumer-oriented, consumer-marketing company. They actually have an environment in which end users, marketing people, are publishing content without direct IT involvement. They have a single platform, a set of reusable Web parts that they use to construct this Internet presence for over 200 different opportunities.

The second case I want to talk about is Volvo. Volvo has embraced SharePoint in over 36 languages, and 70 countries, to build an award-winning, global Web site, as recognized by the Web Globalization Report Card. They build an award-winning Web site using SharePoint again as key infrastructure, a global repository that they use to keep brand consistency for the Volvo brand across the world.

So, with 2010 we’re opening up a new range of possibilities for you, not only for the intranet, but really opening up Internet-facing Web sites as a new place we can go together with the SharePoint 2010 infrastructure.

I’m going to bring Tom back on stage, and we’re going to show you a little bit of some of these technologies at work in Internet-facing Web sites. There’s a new set of products that we’re bringing to market, SharePoint Server for Internet sites. They’re priced to facilitate your building these Internet-facing Web sites in SharePoint. And through our acquisition of Fast, which provides search technologies, the biggest part of the Fast business actually has been built providing search to Internet-facing Web sites. And Tom is going to show you how these come together in some interesting scenarios.

All yours, again, Tom.

TOM RIZZO: All right. Thank you, Steve.

All right. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you very much.

So, three areas here, we’re going to talk about end-user empowerment with the new Web content management features inside of SharePoint 2010. I’ll just show you some of the new rich media integration directly into SharePoint, things like a media Web part build on Silverlight. Silverlight itself integrated into SharePoint, streaming out of SharePoint, all this great stuff that we built into this 2010 platform. Then the last bit, I’m going to show you how you can build even more immersive experiences on the Web using the new Fast technologies, and partnering those inside of SharePoint.

So, let’s get started here. Here’s an Internet-facing site built on SharePoint, so it looks nothing like a team site that you may be used to inside of SharePoint. Now, we’re going to start with end-user empowerment. Lots of times IT folks want to get out of the business of Web development. They want to push this to their end-users, because the end users have most of the content, they want to do the marketing, they want to do the branding on the site. But, IT wants to manage it, Web developers want to make sure it looks like a good site. So, we partnered that all together inside of SharePoint 2010.

So I’m going to go up and create a new product page inside of here, if I could type. And you’ll see a couple of new enhancements around end user empowerment. First and foremost is we’ve implemented the ribbon for Web content management. So, I can clearly go up to my page, I can see the ribbon, I can change all the different permissions, I can go change the settings in the library. I can go and modify my text, I can change my font, I can change my font size. We even support things like XHTML and WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So your sites are accessible, they’re XHTML compliant, they’ll run beautifully across browsers. So, lots of great new enhancements through the ribbon and through all the XHTML support that we have.

Now, end users love to work on Web pages like they do inside of Office. So, PowerPoint is a great example where you go create a new PowerPoint slide, after the fact you may say, great, I want to change that to title content to just title, or change the layout on the fly. So, one of the things we implemented inside of SharePoint 2010 is what we call one-click page layout. So, as an end user I can come up to my page layout, my Web developer set up a bunch of different templates for me in here, and I can just go select two-column layout and you’ll see, on the fly, just like in PowerPoint, the page layout changes. Pretty cool, I’ve got all my – you like that, all right. (Applause.)

So, you see all my chrome across the top. The other thing that end-users love is lots of times they’ll write their Web copy inside of Office and they want to bring that over to the browser. So, we did a lot of work to support cross-browser, rich text editing. So, you see here I’m inside of Word. I’ve got some rich text in here. I’m going to go – let me select it, and I’m just going to copy this, pop back into the browser, go to my page content, right click and put in paste. And now I have the full fidelity between the Office client and SharePoint, so really easy for your end user to create their Web copy.

But, it doesn’t stop there. Lots of times when you create a Web page you just want to put pieces together, reusable content like Kraft did, where you can just drag and drop Web parts on and allow end-users to have a rich site.

So, I’m going to go just add a Web part in here. And you’ll see down here, one of the things that we’ve heard is that you want to add community to your site. So, I’m going to go add the new SharePoint 2010 blog capabilities to my Web site. I have a product blog that exists already inside of my site, and so you’ll see my blog Web part hosted right inside of there.

The other thing, too, is maybe I want some rich media. We’ve got some great videos of our products that we want to show on the site. So, when I go and add another Web part inside of here, you’ll see this media Web part. This is a built-in media player, built right into SharePoint 2010, based on Silverlight. So, you’ll see up will pop my media Web part right inside of there, now watch the ribbon. I’m going to click on the media Web part, the ribbon automatically changes context to a media tab.

My end user is cleared right into the contextual area they need to work on. I can go and change the media, I can change the image, I can make it play automatically. We even support skinning. So, if you want to create skins for the media player, just come in, watch the media player now, I’m going to change it to more of a glass sort of UI. So, you could spend all day creating new skins for this rich media player. Great integration, before you’d have to write a ton of code, your own customer Web parts, now it’s all built right inside of the solution.

The last bit that I want to show you, as I build this site from scratch in about 5 seconds, or 10 seconds here, is maybe I want to have rich search. One of the things that people, when they think about search, the only limit themselves to thinking about the search box. At Microsoft we think search is a lot more than just the search box. We think of how search can power immersive experiences. So, we want to integrate in the Fast technology, where we have a product catalogue that has millions of items in it, and we want to allow people to search that product catalogue, but never type a query. We call it query-less search, where you’re getting rich navigation, but not ever writing a query in the search box.

So, here we built a Silverlight Web part using the new built-in Silverlight Web part inside of SharePoint. We connected it to Fast navigators, the platform inside of Fast, and when I add in this Web part you’re going to see a new experience on my Web page that is my product catalogue, but again you’ll never see me type in a query to actually perform all the searches.

So, I’m done here as the end user, let me go check in my page. You’ll see another end user feature here. You don’t want spelling errors on your Web site. That just totally looks unprofessional. So, built right into SharePoint now is checking for draft items, so you’re not publishing things with broken links. The other thing, too, is spell error checking built right in. So, when I hit cancel here, I love products just like everyone else loves products, you love products. I can right click just like in Word or PowerPoint, up pops the spell checker, I say, actually I also love products. So, I fix my problem there, I go to check in, my spelling errors are all gone, hit continue, and I’m done with my Web page.

Now, let me show you some of this Fast navigation here. So, if I go down to my product catalogue, watch the middle here as I filter on the left hand side. It’s actually performing queries in the back end, but again, I’m not typing in those queries. I’m going to go add in televisions here, and it filters down, I’m going to take this slider and I’m going to slide it over and stop and, bam. I’m right to the product that I want. So, rich navigation, rich experience, Silverlight, Fast, SharePoint all together.

So, what you’re seeing here today, end user empowerment with all the new Web content management capabilities inside of SharePoint. Rich media integration with built-in Silverlight and streaming media right inside the SharePoint environment, and lastly how you can use Fast and SharePoint together to really build immersive experiences inside of your Web site.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: Certainly you had a chance to see a range of technologies. As we bring SharePoint 2010 then to market, you’ll see us also bring a range of new products at new prices to market with SharePoint 2010, products for the intranet, and Internet, products that run on-premise, services that are available to you in the cloud, and all of the client-side technologies, et cetera, that you may need in order to complete the scenarios.

Whether you’re building Internet, or intranet sites, we have solutions that run for you on-premise, and in the cloud. We have the lowest-end version of SharePoint, SharePoint Foundation, which is really the successor to the old Windows SharePoint Services, and then a range of higher-end tools, including the Fast search server, which provides really the highest end both intranet and Internet-facing search capabilities along the lines that Tom just had a chance to show you, so a complete lineup of product offerings, a complete lineup of opportunities for Internet and intranet-facing, new services, because all of this stuff now is beginning to move to the cloud, and of course as I said on the front end, SharePoint Workspace and a variety of other tools to help you composite and build these applications.

I couldn’t be really more excited about where we are with SharePoint 2010. The product is more capable, it’s more extensible, it’s more both Internet-focused and cloud-focused, in addition to intranet and on-premise than ever before. SharePoint is an amazing product. It really is. I’m not sure if you had sort of written down on a piece of paper 10 years ago, when we started the SharePoint journey, I’m not sure we would have written down that it would look exactly like it looks today.

The notion of integrating these different kinds of capabilities, of building something that’s not just an application, but a platform, something that’s not just for inside companies, but for their Web presences. All of that has evolved as we put SharePoint in the marketplace, and we’ve heard back from you, and we’ve gotten the feedback and input that you give us.

This notion of a different kind of a product, we’re not just a portal, or just a document management product. You keep pushing it to add capabilities in a variety of different ways, because even as well as we see it, you see the advantage of the integration of these capabilities into one simple to implement, end user and developer friendly platform, you’ve seen all that as something you really want. And with SharePoint 2010, we’ve really pushed it in this direction.

People ask me a lot, what does SharePoint really compare with, and because of the way you’ve steered us, and driven us, and the kinds of integration and features that are in place, I’m not sure you can say there’s any one product, or service from competitors that exactly lines up. But, I do think with SharePoint 2010 we really have a product that well aligns with the things you want to do, the ways that you want to do them, and the things you’ve been telling us that you want to see us continue to enhance and push forward, for you, for you as developers, as IT people, and for the end user that you serve.

I’m so excited to have had the chance to speak with you at the conference today. It’s a long conference. I think the highlight will actually be probably next, where Jeff Teper gets to show you and talk about some of the new end user capabilities. But, I want you to have absolutely a great conference. I want you to enjoy the product. If you have additional questions or feedback I’m going to try to take a few questions. There’s mikes in the aisle. If I don’t get to a question that’s on your mind, shoot me a piece of e-mail. My e-mail address is [email protected]. I’d love to have a chance to hear what’s on your mind. Be a part of shaping the future of SharePoint.

Thanks very much.