Day one is now over at the Office 2007 developers conference and overall it was a great start. It is strange how normally difficult it is to find qualified developers who can spell SharePoint and yet today I sat in a room with hundreds of them!
I'll let other people comment on the keynotes, I'm more interested in digging down into the detail this week. There is no doubt that Office SharePoint Server technologies are a great architectural step forwards. In this version much thought has been put into how customers are using the technologies and how they will in the future.
For example, we now have a proper model where WSS is really providing the framework for building collaborative solutions rather than the strange nearly upside down model that SharePoint Portal and WSS v2 have today that defies logic at every turn. WSS v3 is also modular, allowing customizations and functionality to be properly packaged in a similar way that webparts can be today instead of the existing methods we must use to "hack" configuration files (many of us have resorted to putting the entire 60 tree in Visual Source Safe to help provide some sanity). I'm also a huge fan of the move to ASP.NET 2.0 webparts and master page templates.
Of course, not everything can be perfect and today I wasn't happy to learn that the web services have not been improved. I was hoping to see a new set of services that would provide closer functionality mapping to the native API, maybe including WSE (web service extensions) for things such as uploading files. It seems this is an area that did not get much attention.
Another area lacking in attention appears to be the security inheritence model. Sure we now get granular security at item and folder level and a wonderful auditing and event model but according to the answer to my question today the inheritence model is still "all or nothing" (you either inherit from the parent or break and start with a copy).
I was very happy to see that there is built in support for user impersonation and priviledge elevation. These have never had clean solutions in the current version with ugly workarounds required and it seems the job scheduler has now been exposed with much more functionality so custom solutions can use it to schedule jobs intelligently.
There is also a good story to tell on incremental and full migration, both content, web part and existing site templates which will be critical if we are to move the current generation of solutions to the new platform. Overall I am much happier that this will be a better platform to build solutions on with less hassle than it is today.
One product that is still conspiciously absent from this event is portal itself. There is much touching on WSS v3 but so far I see only a single search session that addresses functionality that is portal application specific.