Today, day 2, I followed a couple of sessions. One of them was "Hosting Custom Web Services in Office Sharepoint Server 2007". We saw a demo on a Job Posting Sharepoint List. During this demo Tiffany Nguyen developped a webservice that returned the necessary information to an infopath form. Kind of intresting, but to be honest the demo that Roel and Steven prepared for integration between Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Sharepoint was much more exciting. Some thing that I learned was that standard out of the box sharepoint has KPI possibilities and that Performance Point can be easily integrated into Sharepoint.

The next session "New features in SQL Server 2008 for Business Intelligence Developers" by Matthew Roche provided much more input. He explained and showed us many SQL 2008 enhancements like:

- Better data compression resulting in performance increase on SQL Server 2008
- Better backup compression
- small demo on how to change data capture (identify what records have changed in the source system)
- Optimized bitmap features
- Partition enhancements
-T-SQL enhancements

He continued with enhancements on the Integration Services like:

- New dataflow theading model
- VSTA for script tasks& component
- enhanced lookup transform
- enhanced ADO.Net support
- ....

A lot of improvements on the Analysis Services as well with focus on the performance enhancement.
He explained also some data mining enhancements like improved time series algorithms, new data mining add-ins for Microsoft Office systems and the integration with reporting services (SSRS on DMX).

The biggest changes and improvements however are located within the Reporting Services. He explained the changed architecture: a native HTTP.SYS/Custom CLR host (which you can run without IIS). Most impressive (so a very good argument in the market) were the rich visualization tools which looked really great.

After that I followed a session about "Silverlight Basics in Sharepoint". It was made clear what you can do with Silverlight and how to integrate this in Sharepoint. It enables you to build a rich, visually stunning and interactive end-user webexperience. In Visual Studio a Silverlight tab is available and you can easily integrate Silverlight into your development (you can even include webservices into your silverlight project).

What does all this do to a Microsoft Dynamics MCT? Well I am quite convinced that we need change. This message is stressed out through the whole convention. We as a Microsoft Dynamics community must embrase and use all the new features of traditional Microsoft technologies into our projects, as far as they can serve the enduser organisation.

From what I have seen there are many many possibilities to make better solutions for the enduser by implementing these new technologies. Sharepoint, SQL Server, Performance Point, Silverlight, ... they can all be deployed when necessary. It's time for the Dynamics world to embrase the future!

What a challenge for all Dynamics MCT's!