Content Deployment Bootcamp (Mark Rhodes)
Reasonable mix of slides and demos. Several of the slides had an interesting grab of quotes from the community on the new SP2010 content deployment -- most of them positive (or at least optimistic).
There was a brief mention of the problems with content deployment in MOSS2007 (particulary with variations), with the comment that despite initial issues MOSS2007 deployment actually got better with the various service packs and cumulative updates.
The demo was nothing special (it's relatively easy to get simple content deployment working in a demo/lab environment -- it was always real world deployment, with WAN issues, etc, that had problems).
SharePoint 2010 web part development (Ishai Sagi, Brian Farnhill)
The presentation was mostly demos (there were slides, but they weren't used much) -- which actually worked quite well. The two presenters worked well together and packed in a heap of demos -- an AJAX web part built from scratch, a Silverlight web part, how to upgrade web parts from 2007 including a demo of existing WSP's just working versus ones that need recompiling (or updating), plus a demo of the new developer dashboard and how you can use it to troubleshoot web part perfomance issues.
It was a lot of demo's they packed in and fairly informative. A good session overall.
Information Management with SharePoint 2010 (Rai Umar, Gayan Peiris)
A business-focussed session with a good overview of the information management aspects of SP 2010.
SP 2010 has expanded many of the record management features to be applicable anywhere you want in the system (not just a single record center). Another key component is the managed metadata service with hierarchical taxonomies.
There was a good slide with the positioning of different elements (MySites, digital asset management, etc) fit on a scale of managed taxonomies to open folksonomies and scope from team to enterprise-wise.
SharePoint 2010 Development - Business Connectivity Services (Adam Cogan)
The session title was not a good description of the content -- Adam went off on quite a tangent and a significant portion was spend on Facebook integration (I think this is just Adam doing his own thing -- something I have seen before).
Anyway, after a brief demo of BCS connecting to Adventure Works as a power user (including pulling the result into Outlook), the majority of the session was about integrating SharePoint + Facebook.
Admittedly one of the options for integrating with Facebook was via BCS, which may have been the point of the demo (not sure). In terms of other options given there was pulling from Facebook (via JS or API) or pushing to Facebook (via Workflow or Event Receiver).
It was suggested that the push model (e.g. Workflow) may actually be best for organisations that want to own their own data, plus push to multiple locations (SharePoint, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), although the BCS option was the one demoed.
For the BCS option, the Facebook Development Kit (from Codeplex) was used to show how easy it is to integrate SharePoint + Facebook.
In Depth Architecture and Design Planning
Slides only presentation covering a wide range of architecture and planning. Started with an refreshing on MOSS 2007 capacity planning, then moved into SP 2010 considerations.
A brief mention of upgrade options, with in-place upgrade not recommended in most cases. (The database mount aka database attach approach was recommended as best practice; there are also many situations where in-place is not even directly possible, e.g. where hardware migration is needed.)
There was a discussion of disaster recovery solutions, mostly focussing on database mirroring. SP 2010 is failover aware, but using a SQL alias for your database is still a good idea for databases such as the config database.