I enjoyed my time at ODC 2008, especially the nice San Jose, CA weather. I was greeted with a 20-degree wind gust as I left Lambert Airport upon my arrival home in St. Louis Wednesday night. Of course, that can't be as bad as the weather was for one guy I met from Fargo, ND. Anyway, I was impressed with the professionalism and presentation skills of the speakers I saw at the majority of sessions I attended. I'm a SharePoint newbie, so I spent most of my time attending the sessions on Unified Communications. My company is starting to see more work being requested by clients asking about Unified Communications and Office Communicator Server 2007, so I wanted to learn more about it. I've got to say I was quite pleased with the speakers at the UC/OCS sessions. I expected to enjoy the sessions from Ted Pattison, Andrew Connell and David Mann (which I very much did), but I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw from the folks talking about UC and OCS.
First off, I enjoyed the keynote by Gurdeep Singh Pall - CVP, Microsoft Unified Communications Group. Now, I will say that I wasn't really happy with the overall amount of keynotes at ODC (we didn't even start the breakout sessions until 1:30pm on day one), but I did like this one. There were two applications demonstrated. The first one was a silky, smooth 3-D modeling application used by a company to view equipment pieces to study the manufacturing process. The company had utilized the Unified Communications Client API to extend the collaboration features provided by OCS 2007. It was really impressive to see someone show how they were able to look at something in this 3-D graphical environment, check a co-worker's presence, call that co-worker, start a video conference sharing the 3-D environment view, and being collaborating together to discuss an issue that was best described visually. Thinking of what would typically be involved in this situation (like physically going to the guy's computer to see what he's talking about), it was pretty cool to see what an advantage this company has by being able to collaborate in this manner, in real-time. Cool stuff. The other demo was put on by Clarity Consulting, and showed a situation in which a shopper went to a store to purchase some wine glasses. The employee checked a WPF application to see if the item was in stock, which it wasn't. With the UC extensibility features in the application, the employee was able to utilize the application to immediately contact a sales associate in another area store, by making a phone call from the application, and ask if the other store had the wine glasses in stock. Of course, the other store had glasses in stock, so the sales associate there put the items on hold for the customer until he could pick them up. This kind of real-time communication between two different store locations to help out a customer in a pinch was pretty nifty. It was all integrated into the application used by sales associates at a retail store, with no need to place a separate phone call, which may or may not get answered immediately. The application enabled the sales associate to see another associate's presence and immediately put the two associates in touch with each other. All in all, pretty slick.
There were other sessions on OCS that dug into the tools and APIs available for developers. This is definitely an area lacking in folks with real-world experience. I would say the sessions averaged maybe 20 people, whereas the popular SharePoint sessions had people sitting on the floor. I wish there would have been more sessions to cover some of the other APIs available to developers, but I enjoyed the ones I did get to see. I was really disappointed that the Unified Communications Deep Dive pre-conference event was canceled. I see more businesses looking for this kind of thing in the future, so it's definitely worthwhile to learn. Like I said, my company is seeing the sort of functionality mentioned above being asked about, even if it's just embedding presence information into SharePoint. There are several APIs to get a grasp of, but I'm sure the tools will improve over time. In the meantime, I will try to blog about my experiences with OCS development as I go along. There definitely isn't a whole of information out there about it now.