My reason for going to this session is that I am looking at a rather larger big project which will need both Commerce Server 2007 and some sort of Content Management System. I've been looking at SiteCore, Synkron, and of course SharePoint 2007. Now we've been trying to set up a meeting with Microsoft for ... well it feels like forever since I need the info like 1½ months ago. Fate would have us wait until TechEd to get at the info but bout was the wait worth the wait.

I basically got all the information I needed and the answers I wanted. Patrick Tisseghem really knows his stuff and it's obvious why he was give a speakers slot at TechEd. I wouldn't want to go up against him in a market that's for sure :)

The session revolved around showing us the "out-of-the-box" experience of the CMS features of SharePoint 2007. I've done some work on Microsoft Content Management 2002 and as far as the developer experience goes it pretty much delivers. However it leaves a bit to be desired on the business user side. You basically need to do a whole lot of Visual Studio development in order to get the business users going.

SharePoint 2007 delivers a very different story. Visual Studio is only required for adding new functionality to SharePoint. You will not need it to do the basic CMS tasks like you did in the past. I was very impressed with what you get out of the box. And I'm proud to say that we as company did "the right thing(tm)" when we went along with SP07 before we had all the facts.

Patrick demoed how we'd go about doing various common tasks in SP CMS. While everything was available to customize I do have second thoughts on the usability of the product. You have all kinds of switches to pull and my concern is that it will be too much for the business users. You will need a larger number of clicks to just enable CMS functionality of SharePoint. When you have enabled that, you will need to do a number of additional tasks in order to display custom information on your site.

With that said I think that we as developers will be faced with the task to simplify the job for business users. SharePoint adds everything you'll need to create a CMS site (yes the kitchen sink is included) thus we'll need to do everything in our power to present the available feature in a manner that will stimulate the users rather than scare them and ultimately alienate them.