Today was the last day of the SharePoint Conference.Org, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to speak with more show attendees. SharePoint 2010 is definitely on everyone’s minds and it seems the majority of the attendees are planning to start serious deployment efforts of SharePoint 2010 in the latter part of this year. While most of our recent outbound messaging is focused on communicating our readiness plans for 2010, it seems we overlooked an obvious question. We got this one frequently over the past two days: Will Bamboo continue to support the current SharePoint platform (WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007) after SP 2010 is released? The answer is “Absolutely!” Bamboo products will continue to be offered and supported on the current SharePoint platform well into the foreseeable future. So although all the chatter in the SharePoint universe seems 2010 focused now, we aren’t going to be forgetting about 2007 anytime soon!

Our own Daisy Anand and Angela Dillon gave their session on project management today. Although I admit I may be biased a bit, I thought they did an excellent job. (We actually were told that the session evals came back excellent as well – so it must be more than just bias.) Angela’s cool Aussie accent and Daisy’s fun relaxed presentation style helped communicate the topic in an entertaining way. Daisy began by talking about some of the new capabilities of SP 2010 that could be used to build effective SharePoint PM solutions. This included the use of the new Project Tasks List type with its Predecessor column. I think those who are doing light project management will find the use of that field in producing Gantt charts to show task dependencies to be very helpful. Angela took over at the mid-way point in the presentation to cover some of the more advanced project management capabilities that are baked into our PM Central product. This included a review of the project portfolio and program level dashboarding, resource management, and some of the targeted alerting scenarios delivered with the product.

Another one of the sessions I attended was led by John Stover of SusQtech. He gave a really good presentation on content types and the new taxonomy feature of SharePoint 2010. Those familiar with content types from the prior release of SharePoint will be interested in checking out some of the new predefined content types that are offered in the Content Type Gallery and the notion of Enterprise Content Types in SP 2010. By utilizing the new managed metadata service, you can then define a local or system taxonomy that can not only be associated with content types – but also reused as the basis for search refinements and to help drive some of SP 2010’s social media features. I expect John must lead training as he did a fantastic job covering the basics of his topic and then gradually stepping up to present more complicated concepts. Because of the way he presented the information, I think someone with very little SharePoint knowledge coming in could have easily followed it end to end.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the Bamboo table over the past two days.  It was nice to hear your SharePoint “stories” and to share with you information about our products and plan for SP2010 – and 2007!