As I prepare to head home from TechEd EMEA 2008, my impression is that this has been a good week. As I predicted, most attendees were focused pretty hard on the sessions for the whole conference. The booth got busy in the between times, but otherwise, we had plenty of time to work with folks on some pretty sticky issues.

This year, most products are starting to mature, but there were some nice announcements of stuff either just out, or coming soon. In particular, Windows Server 2008 R2, and several updates to Microsoft System Center are of importance to the SharePoint community. System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) has added some great backup and disaster recovery functionality for SharePoint - including at the Item, Site, and Site Collection level. When you toss in some of the gains made in Hyper-V virtualization, you can finally do some really granular, yet robust, recovery scenarios. I'll need to work through some of them myself, but you can be sure that once I do, I'll report my findings.

There was a fairly significant SharePoint-related announcement made this week - the Microsoft Certified Master Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 credential. This is an uber-training and certification program that requires significant industry experience - as well as passing all four existing SharePoint Certification exams - just to get started. In an earlier post, I have said that there are very few who are able to wrap their minds around the entirety of SharePoint. This is the credential for them to work on in order to prove they have done so.

And lest we forget, a key point of these conferences is to bring people to together. I'm very happy that I had the chance to catch up with several friends from the SharePoint community, both from within Microsoft, and from elsewhere. I have also made some new acquaintances who I'm sure will become great friends, and I will look forward to seeing them again the next event, or even before.