Day 1 at SPC

What I learned day 1 of the SharePoint Conference:
7400 attendees
7.5 miles of cable for the "wireless" LAN
Microsoft is pushing the SP Online hard - Ballmer must have said it 25 times.
Using the Office 2007 ribbon all throughout SP2010 and SPD 2010. Microsoft loves their ribbon.
Inside content areas is very wiki like, add pages and links using wiki markup.
Media will automatically play in SharePoint via Silverlight (work on a Mac?)
Spell check in content areas - which is a big help.
Steveb@microsoft.com is Steve Ballmer's email address, hit him up if you like.
All new programs (designer, visual studio, the 2010 suite) must be upgraded together to get the benefit, you cannot get Designer 2010 and use it with SP2007.
OneNote on the web is what SP is trying to emulate
Power of the crowd - tagging, rating, taxonomy - favorite of the SP dev team
Silverlight org chart built by sp automagically
Made social and interactive a lot better
Scaling up and out on lists and libraries - over 1 million items in lists, actually multiple millions - and it was fast in the demos I saw
PerformancePoint reporting (NEW) can break down where the numbers come from. Slice and dice. Very nice.
2010 is mostly AJAX - don't have to wait for pages to post and redisplay - which will save me HOURS per month!
SPD 2010:
You can restrict spd and what it can do in central admin and site collection Summary pages, ribbon, quick launch navigation
Creating sp content
Manage site security
Manage lists directly in spd, which is brand new - and awesome!
List items must still be added via browser - link on summary page
Security is faster and easier in spd
Create content types and attach to lists directly
Site assets - images, xml, javascript, css - everything for the site XSLT data view web parts are everywhere and can now be manipulated through the browser and in spd
Drag and drop functionality in spd for data files!
Site assets are automatically added to lists/available content
Insert formula to combine columns - cool, but how useful really?
Connect to data sources outside of sharepoint - use single sign on
Business connectivity service external content types - user does not even know they are editing a database
Workflow: reusable workflows! YEAH! Site collection workflows as well!
Workflow subject line can contain workflow data and free text (string)
Rich text editing for workflow emails!

Overall, SP 2010 and Designer 2010 seem awesome, but I don't know if I have seen a compelling reason to actually upgrade. Today I have dashboarding, document assembly in SP and Office tools, a special Colligo lunch (the SP offline guys), workflow overview, and finally a multi-user authoring session. It will be another full day.

Now I know what Catalyst attendees feel like. Too much information...on overload.