MUGH's Cummunity Launch of Office and Vista in Hyderabad
On April 29th we had the community launch of Office 2007 and Vista in Hyderabad, india. It was a hot summer and was a sunday and was also the day next to the World cup, and still we saw a crowd of over 200 attending the event.
The event happened at the Microsoft Campus in Hyderabad, and this time we had managed the Registration very well as compared to last time when there was lot of delya because of security reasons.
I had given a session on developing Office Business Applications, and it was titled as 'Why should developers care for office'. I usually see a myth floating around that office is not for developers and it's just a front office or an IT pro tools. And my main focus during my session was on how can one build an enteprise application with Office System, and how important it becomes for developers and architects to understand the office system. My Session was followed by two more sessions by Sudhakar on VSTO Development and by Hima Bindu on SharePoint 2007 which were very good.
On the Vista side we had Harish and Sridhar from Microsoft talking about Vista Experience and on Application Compatability. Arun gave a session on the developers favorite topic, the WinFX.
My overall experience has been very good and the audience feedback about the event has also been good, with ofcourse few suggestions mentioned. However i also felt that to understand and appreciate softwares like Office and Vista one needs to have good level of understanding and maturity of the enterprise problems and scenarios. So these are definetly not something that can be told completely in a single day session or in a training programme . And one more funny thing that i observed was SharePoint is now very well known as MOSS however it's still not well known as Microsoft "Office" SharePoint System. Understanding the Office family becomes more important now than before to build a good OBA.
In between the session, we had a very interesting series of Quiz questions and most of the audience this time were pretty smart to grab some very nice prizes. Some of the audience had come up with very interesting questions during and after the sessions on some of the Office scenarios and i really enjoyed talking to all of them.
I must thank the sponsers , MAQ, Satyam , INETA and Micrsoft to help us organize this event successfully. And thanks to the audience for being so wonderful.