Microsoft’s director of SharePoint Tom Rizzo kicked off Day Two of SPTechCon with a keynote looking at where SharePoint’s been and where it’s going. Interestingly, when he asked the hundreds of people in attendance if they were evaluating the download of SharePoint 2010 beta, perhaps a quarter of the people raised their hands. Later, in an interview with SPTechReport, Rizzo admitted he “was surprised” by the low level of uptake among attendees. He speculated that the requirements of 64-bit SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 might be holding people back.

Rizzo continued to hold the Microsoft line on the 2010 release date, saying the software should be made generally available “by June.”

Also after the keynote, Rizzo took on Google Buzz, which is being positioned as a rival to SharePoint. “Google does a salvo with lots of new technologies, and lots just go away after a short time. [With Google Buzz], they have one little piece of a big social-computing set.”

Enterprises don’t want social technology in isolation from their CM or search systems, Rizzo said, adding that Google has “one-twentieth of what people want. Ninety-nine percent of their revenue is in the search business. Maybe 1% is in the enterprise space.”

A rumor has been swirling here that Rizzo is transitioning away from the SharePoint team to work on Microsoft’s cloud technologies, but Rizzo would neither confirm nor deny it, saying, “I won’t comment on any of that.”

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SharePoint 911’s Todd Klindt and Shane Young (or is it Shane Young and Todd Klindt?) brought down the house during their “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (About SharePoint)” presentation last evening. They presented fun facts about SharePoint, including such little-known gems as “Al Gore invented SharePoint,” and that “On average, SharePoint administrators are 50% better-looking than their developer counterparts.” Oh, and they also gave some serious advice about administering SharePoint installations, too. Well done, and well received!

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The “Dux Watch” is over! Dux Raymond Sy, one of the more popular speakers at SPTechCon, has been waylaid in Washington, D.C., frustrated by not being here and tweeting wildly about it. Well, it turns out Dux will arrive late tonight and do two sessions tomorrow. The first, in the 605 class slot, will be “Best Practices for Gathering Requirements for SharePoint,” and the second is his previously scheduled class on “SharePoint Worst Practices: Five Common Mistakes to Avoid” in class slot 903.

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The totally unofficial, completely subjective “coolest thing at the show” was Capturx, a “pen” that scans the page as it writes for uploading forms and unstructured data into Office or SharePoint applications. Adapx, which created the device, is a venture-backed company made up of former Microsoft employees who work in the area of natural user interface technology—the use of pen, paper, ink, voice or gesture, for example.

Capturx helps organizations solve the problem of getting data off paper without changing their workflow. Ken Schneider, CEO of Adapx, said field workers can fill out forms using the company’s dot-matrix notebooks and scanner pens that read the dot patterns in the paper, and the information can be converted into text to populate fields in Excel. That text then becomes searchable and actionable, providing tremendous benefits over stacks of paper reports that need to be manually input into computer systems.

Ted Gauld, Adapx's head of product management, then demonstrated how a field worker could complete the form, upload it to his or her mobile phone, and then transmit the original form to a back-end application, where the information can be stored textually or in the original document.

— David