Highlights from Microsoft 2011 SharePoint conference in Anaheim, California

This year, 7,500 SharePoint enthusiasts attended the 2011 SharePoint conference in Anaheim, California. They participated in more than 240 sessions presented by Microsoft, SharePoint experts and customers — panels that focus on how SharePoint customers “can use the product as a platform for critical business applications, collaboration, content management, search, enterprise social networking, and more.” Microsoft used this opportunity to “reflect on 10 years of redefining collaboration and look ahead to where the cloud and a growing SharePoint ecosystem will take the product next.”

Below are the highlights of the event:
• In 2008, SharePoint exceeded $1 billion in revenues. It is the fastest Microsoft product to attain this milestone, and it’s growing at double-digit speed.
• More than 125 million SharePoint licenses have been sold to over 65,000 customers.
• Over 62 million SharePoint 2010 licenses have been sold.
• If SharePoint were a stand-alone company, it would be one of the top 50 software firms in the world.
• 80% of the Fortune 500 run SharePoint.
• SharePoint is #1 in satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, awareness, and market share.
• SharePoint has a vibrant ecosystem with more than 700,000 developers and more than 4,000 trained partners.
• Currently, there are 1,000 ISV solutions for SharePoint 2010 and another 1,000 in development.
• This year alone, Microsoft trained more than 93,000 partners on the SharePoint platform.

Microsoft announced a New SharePoint certification program designed to take customers’ SharePoint deployments to the next level, an addition to the suite of Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) certifications: MCA SharePoint. Through a rigorous review board and exam process, the MCA program helps the highest-achieving IT architecture professionals distinguish their expertise with Microsoft server technologies, including SharePoint solutions for enterprise customers.

SharePoint and Office 365, deliver enhanced collaboration and productivity tools in the cloud. Office 365 is not just about creating documents. Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop or the largest global corporation, it’s what you can do with your information that matters. Office 365 provides tools to create, share and collaborate using the Office productivity suite, email and calendar, shared documents, team workspaces, IM, online meetings and video chat. Businesses using SharePoint Online and Office 365 are already reporting impressive results.

Business Connectivity Services come to SharePoint Online. Microsoft plans to expand the business critical services delivered by Office 365 and Azure and make moving to the cloud even easier for customers. By the end of the year, the first round of service updates to SharePoint Online since Office 365 launched will be complete and will enable customers to use Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to connect to data sources via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services endpoints. BCS lets customers use and search data from other systems as if it lives in SharePoint—in both read and write modes.