Thursday I attended a Microsoft Vista/Office/Exchange launch event. It was the largest such event Microsoft Canada has ever put on.

The event started with the keynote presentation. On stage was the president of Microsoft Canada. This individual initially was quite awkward on stage, but he did get more comfortable as the morning went on. He brought up a consultant that has worked with CICICI. This speaker focused on business topics, never relating them to Microsoft of the IT industry. It would seem he may have been brought in to fill up time.

They moved onto a technology demo, focusing on Office and telephony integration. Very impressive demo. Through Outlook, he checked his voicemail, and then through a telephone, he was able to edit his calendar in a fairly seamless fashion. Last I looked, this required very specific PBX hardware to tie in, but I hope they expand the supported hardware base, as this would be amazing to set up in our company.

Throughout the event, Sharepoint 2007 was hyped. It does seem to be a fantastic product. The ability to manage workflow should be a boon to many businesses. Unfortunately, I think many such businesses will get excited over the potential, and lose track of the implementation of such a solution. Getting it to work right will take a lot of forethought and planning.

Another neat concept of Sharepoint is that it now auto builds wiki’s and blogs for projects and people. Perhaps not so useful for us, but again, others will like this functionality. They also mentioned the Groove product, which allows external access to data. This is not part of Sharepoint, and it would seem that it should be. Perhaps next version.

Sharepoint has replication features that are bandwidth friendly. Only the changed information gets replicated, not the entire file. Also, it has excellent auditing features, can log every touch of a file, including prints.

Vista information was very minimal. This was unfortunate, as many of the diverse audience came specifically for Vista information. Perhaps this is representative of the fact that there is not a whole lot of new functionality in Vista.

They of course showed off Flip 3D. I personally do not like this feature. I am much more impressed by Apple’s similar feature, which shrinks all the open apps so you can see them at the same time. More powerful I think. Also, searching was talked about prominently.

They reminded me that you can save searches, a feature I had known about, but forgot to ever try.

As for new features that I was not aware of, they put the spotlight on the Mobility Center (Windows Key-X), and a new way to set up virtual meetings. The mobility center is handy, in that it gives instant access to commonly used functions, such as volume, external display, power settings, and network settings, among others. The other feature, Windows Meeting Space really caught my eye. It lets you setup a meeting between two Vista PCs in a very simple and easy manner. You can share a program or your desktop, create handouts (files) that everyone has access to, and it even creates an Ad Hoc wireless network so you do not need a wireless access point, very handy indeed.

They also had some information on a product called Proclarity, which seems like a potential competitor to Crystal Reports.

Overall, I was impressed with the event. Most of the speakers were engaging enough, and they mixed in lots of demos, which really help to illustrate what they are talking about.

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