Here are some news directly from the keynote of SharePoint Conference 2011, in Anaheim, CA.

The most interesting news, from a developer viewpoint, is the upcoming release (by the end of this year) of an update of SharePoint Online for Office365. This update will deliver the capability to host BCS against Web Services in SharePoint Online sites. As you can imagine this is a killer feature, that will allow us to connect cloud portals with on-premises contents and services, as well as will allow connecting Windows Azure hosted services with SharePoint Online sites! Cool! Hybrid scenarios are the future in my opinion for the next 5/10 years.

Has been also announced the MCA (Microsoft Certified Architect) certification for SharePoint. It deserves further investigation …

About performances, they showed a very impressive demo based on giant farm made of a 13TB content database with over 100 millions of documents and a FAST search seeking results in 0.23 seconds! Impressive and super-fast!

Under the cover there was the following architecture:

• 6 WFE
• 5 FAST Search & Index
• 2 FAST Service & Admin
• 2 CA

From an hardware point of view the data were stored on an EMC2 SAN with 400TB of storage!

They simulated a failover clustering, while executing a 7.500 concurrent users stress-test. The failover node came up in less than 5 seconds and the SharePoint farm came back to production.

Of course the key concept of the demo was to say: Hey! Everybody can do that on his own sites, just moving to Office365! Smile

Lastly they announced that the next edition of the SPC2012 will be hosted in Las Vegas (like in 2009) at the Mandala Bay Hotel on 12-15 November 2012. Stay tuned!