One thing I did drive home at the presentation last night was how extensible that SharePoint is. SharePoint is built on the .Net 2.0 Framework and heavily utilises the power of ASP.NET Framework also. Unlike other vendors, all of the core 6 areas (CMS wire ref - believe it or not I couldn't find one on the Microsoft SharePoint site) of SharePoint are built on this and use the same format API's and Web Services.

A lot of the other Vendors out there trying to build on their Enterprise Content Management (ECM) story have had to go and acquire products to complete this. For instance, IBM bought Filenet, OpenText purchased Hummingbird and therefore RedDot CMS. ECM bought Documentum. The problem with this is although they tick every box in terms of Document Management, Records Management, Web Content Management etc. is that they will be built on a mixture of platforms and frameworks from Java to COM. This causes issues with these key areas communicating with each other and restricts generic actions occuring across all areas.

A good example to demonstrate this is the security model that covers the entire SharePoint areas. Or how you can add Event Listeners to List Items which are pretty much the buidling blocks of the entire Platform. I was reading an article which demonstrated how easy it was to extend the very light weight Records Center to meet the clients requirements.

These kind of extensions are easily wrapped up in Features and if organisations are nice...shared via CodePlex. Two key CodePlex Projects are CKS and SharePoint 2007 Features.

In the following months I can see CodePlex growing a great rate, I'm suprised there's not many Workflows being published on there to be honest.