EMEA Project Conference: Keynote Thoughts

Well, the keynote just ended and I needed to check email so I thought I'd do a quick post. A good chunk of the keynote had already been covered by yesterday's partner-only sessions. However, Mike Angiulo publicly announced that the Office 2007 family Service Pack 1 will be available on December 11th, 2007. I guess that means we can tell the world! I'm surprised, actually, that I haven't noticed this on any of the SharePoint blogs I frequent.

Anyhoo... We were given a short demo of Project 14. It has some useful new features that should make it easier to build a new project when you don't have all the details - much more so than Project 2007. Much to Paul's horror, however, Project 14 has a shiny ribbon bar! I guess that's going to be a real love/hate thing. Personally, I quite like the ribbon bar, but I can understand why some folk think of it as burying functionality because not all the millions of toolbar icons are visible at once.

Also interesting is that Project Portfolio Server is being merged into Project Server with version 14. As someone who is new to the area of EPM this is a product which I am not familiar with, but merging functionality into a single system would seem to me to have serious benefits, not least in terms of having one less system to manage.

I'm not going to blog every session I attend, but if I see something interesting I will post later. Right now, it's time for the first 'real' session of the day - a sysadmin chalk and talk.