RIP SharePoint Conference

Yesterday Julie White announced that we will have a new unified event in Chicago in 2015 that will replace several of our trade shows from the past. Most notably for my community of peers, the SharePoint Conference and TechEd.

This is bittersweet. I’ve always had a great time at the SharePoint Conference and have enjoyed immensely the time spent learning, meeting, mentoring and getting mentored by the SharePoint community. The change underscores the changing times and the fact that the future is now. Cloud isn’t something that’s going to happen; it’s happening now. Those of us that grew up racking servers in datacenters have already been dealing with cloud deployments for at least several years. Now the big tradeshows are changing, appropriately, to reflect the changing technology.

On the plus side, I’m excited about the future of the platform. The product “SharePoint” is evolving and may not remain “SharePoint” for much longer. I have no insight into the product group’s plans but if you look at the history of standalone products like FAST and CMS being integrated into the larger SharePoint product, then you can see that what is past is prologue. I have customers that today won’t even think of the cloud, but a year ago NONE of my customers even considered the cloud.

When I came into the workforce the mainframe guys were on their way out and I was the scrappy kid converting all of their green-bar printed COBOL code into Win16/32 applications. They complained that they didn’t want to learn new technologies. Now I’m the same position and I don’t want to make the same mistake they made.

I imagine the new conference will focus on the API’s and services that can cross products. Since hosted servers in customer datacenters are becoming less and less common those of us that were infrastructure guys are encouraged to dust off some of the coding skills that we invariably acquired during our career. There’s a new wave of demand for devs coming, just like there was a huge wave of demand for SharePoint folks over the last 10 years. Time to ride a new wave!

I’ll be sure to be in Chicago for the 2015 kickoff to this new event, whatever we decide to call it. Cloudapalooza? OfficeChella?

Paul Thurrott gives us his analysis on his post R.I.P., TechEd