This morning we heard from Steve Ballmer, Tom Rizzo and Jeff Teper. Having been in the SharePoint community since 2001, I was amazed to sit in a room with 7000 SharePoint enthusiast. SharePoint has grown in popularity. The keynotes were full of announcements, including a nice note regarding some of our project with Conservation International and Library of Congress. I summarize a few of the exciting announcements below:

• Developer experience has been dramatically enhanced; no more long steps to develop and deploy. Visual Studio is not fully aware of SharePoint and developers are going to love the 1-click, build and deploy. Developer dashboard is a great enhancement to troubleshoot performance of deployment and enhance scalability.
• Dramatic improvement in user empowerment
• SharePoint internet sites will see nice enhancements. First the packaging will be revised to include better tier level for smaller deployments. Compatibility has been enhanced and I loved the 1-click page layout change. In addition, Microsoft will be offering cloud deployment of SharePoint internet sites; this is exciting news for medium to small businesses that have been hesitant to move their public facing sites to SharePoint mostly due to licensing constraints.
• WSS no more; we got used to the MOSS and WSS acronyms. Get ready to revise your vocabulary. WSS is now SharePoint Foundation and MOSS has been renamed SharePoint Server. FAST will now be offered as a package to SharePoint Server (both for intranet and public facing sites)
• Business Data Catalog (BDC) is now renamed Business Catalog Services

More to come as the day unwinds….