We’re just wrapping up the second day of presentations at ILTA’s SharePoint Symposium in Downers Grove, IL.  Attendance was surprisingly good and it was great to spend time with clients and colleagues.  Presentation content has varied from technical (editing FAST index profile XML files) to non-technical, including what I thought to be a great session on social computing by Mark Beckmann from MSFT, Stuart Kay, Global Business Systems Director at Baker & McKenzie, and Chad Ergun, consultant and former Practice Systems Manager at White & Case.  Not many questions, but thought the content was interesting. 

Just sat through a case study presentation by Klarquist Sparkman, LLP, a 60 attorney firm out of Portland, OR.  They are using InfoPath and Nintex workflow and their work looks impressive, including a matter intake process integrated with Elite.  Very nice.

Enterprise search seemed to be a hot topic with discussions about MOSS Search, FAST Search, Recommind and others. Not as many questions about SharePoint 2010 as I expected.

Overall, I was disappointed in the amount of repeat content from last year’s symposium.  Seems that some firms are still delivering the same portal capabilities from twelve months ago, and that some of the fundamental capabilities that we provide with OneView are still viewed by some as highly custom or difficult to implement.  Seems we need to increase our educational efforts.

There were more sponsors this year, up to five from three sponsors last year including XMLAW.  This meant less time for us to present/demo our solutions (I used 18 minutes of our 15 minute time slot today). I’m hoping that next year ILTA can organize the schedule so that sponsors get more air time.  One sponsor turned up their sales volume just a bit too much during someone else’s session, so I think dedicating a full session for each vendor would allow each to sell themselves without interrupting other presenters.