Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer will keynote the conference focused on what the company has repeatedly praised as its fastest-growing server product. The SharePoint Conference 2009 is scheduled to debut today, October 19th, and will end on the same day that Windows 7 launches worldwide, October 22nd. Ballmer will keynote the Las Vegas event and will give over 7,000 SharePoint customers, partners and developers a taste of the product’s future, namely SharePoint Server 2010, planned for release in 2010, most likely around spring.

“We will be talking about SharePoint Server 2010, which we’ve said will be broadly available in the first half of next year. During my keynote, I will show some of our key investment areas and new capabilities that will help developers rapidly build SharePoint applications, provide customers with enhanced capabilities for Internet sites, and deliver choice and flexibility between on-premises and cloud-based solutions. This will include showcasing some of the features and technologies that we are delivering in the next version of the product,” Ballmer noted.

As far as the actual SharePoint Server product is concerned, Microsoft’s CEO revealed that the business was on fire. SharePoint is in fact one of the $1 billion businesses of the Redmond company. Ballmer noted in this regard that the server solution was designed to help companies boost productivity while controlling costs, by enhancing the way that workers access, share and collaborate. In addition, Microsoft regards SharePoint Server as a platform. Ballmer noted that the company expected an explosion in the number of developers building code on top of SharePoint Server following the introduction of the next iteration of the product.

“There is incredible enthusiasm among the developer community for SharePoint. We know that hundreds of thousands of developers have used the SharePoint platform in the past year, and we believe that will increase to more than 1 million developers over the next couple of years with the introduction of SharePoint Server 2010,” Ballmer predicted.