On Wednesday and Thursday I attended the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference in Hammersmith. This was a chance for people to see lots of Office and SharePoint 2007 stuff from the conferences that were held in the US earlier in the year. Although I attended the SharePoint 2006 conference in Seattle in May coming to this event in London enabled me to see some sessions that I had to miss in May because of two interesting sessions running at the same time. Every single conference I've been to this has always happened to me, and I always hear others complain about it. I wonder if there will ever be a conference where you get to attend every session you want to!

Overall I spent time looking at the Business Intelligence sessions during the first day. It's a little disappointing that all the Microsoft presenters had what seemed really slow laptops as the demo's some were trying to give were really really slow and they had to keep apologising and mentioning they were running on Beta software! Get a decent system to demo on and you wouldn't even have to mention that!

The second day saw a mish mash of lots of things from content management to developing on top of Groove. The most interesting thing I saw over the two days was a session I wouldn't usually attend on Access 2007 and WSS v3. Linking SharePoint v3 lists to Access and publishing Access 2007 databases to SharePoint lists looks very cool and looks really good for businesses running Access databases and want to get that data into WSS. I'll probably record a blogcast very soon showing some of that functionality off.

The keynote on the first day was based on Visual Studio Tools for Office. It seems that developing applications around Office 2007 might be a real alternative rather than creating custom winforms applications. It'll be interesting to see how quickly Office 2007 is deployed in companies and how much interest there will be on using VSTO.