Yesterday the WSS team triumphed at PDC making people go crazy with their demonstrations on all of the new features of SharePoint vNext. Some of the bloggers I talked to having a wishlist were extremely satisfied with all of it and they saw almost all of their bullet points addressed. Here are the things I most like about the next version:

• WSS becomes a true development platform for anyone who builds intranet sites that entail some form of document management and collaboration. Out-of-the box you have great functionality but the team has succeeded in opening up everything and allowing developers to customize and extend WSS sites. The way you extend and customize has become so rich that I think many developers who get the mission to build intranets definitely have to first look at how to utilize the WSS infrastructure.
• I do love the two-way Outlook integration. Man, this is going to rock when introducing this to business users. The full power of SharePoint vNext will certainly be unleashed if you move to Office 12 as your smart client front-end.
• Event handling, something I worked on for the PDC labs, is another thing without any doubt wonderful. Events everywhere and anywhere (pre and post). I saw how many people in the room where thinking about all of the scenarios where they can use this.
• Re-usability has been built in the whole infrastructure at various levels, going from the features feature :-) giving us more re-usability at the template level to for example content types allowing for sharing of document library and list definitions.

I am also happy to announce that together with my buddy Ted Pattison, I will be doing the Office 12 ascend trainings starting in January and taking me to different places in Europe and even India, China and maybe Australia. Preparation has started yesterday with a good dinner. This is going to be so interesting for me working on demos and labs covering all of the goodies we are seeing here at the PDC.