This week I am taking a break in my O12 ascend tour having finished the first three ones with a lot of good and positive feedback. The material is way too much for only 4 days but the participants in Chertsey (UK), Paris and Munchen were very excited about all of the new stuff we will bring out next fall. It seems that here in Europe, most of the attendees (and they are all working for companies that are ISVs), are more into the Office client-side development but they were very impressed with the new WSS v3 solutions framework. Personally, my favorite topics to cover are the new features framework in WSS v3 and InfoPath '12'. Man, the way you can now customize, package, deploy and activate your own custom solutions for SharePoint is incredibly simple, rich and flexible. I am very curious about all of the additions on top of WSS that people (and the community) will bring out the next couple of months. I have already a couple of them in the pipeline. Just waiting for the nagging NDA to go away and start posting about it :)

One of the reasons why I like to travel so much is learning new people. In three weeks, I have met about 60 new people from all around the world (Europe, but also New Zealand and South-Africa). Here is a nice picture of the whole bunch in Paris where we had a lovely dinner and went for a walk after that. That was quite impossible in Munchen last week with temperatures around -20 C° but we had good Greek and Italian food (and of course a lot of beer).

So, this week no travel? You kidding! I am going for the first time to Kolding in Denmark giving a wide overview of information worker technologies to a pre-sales department of a company over there. And then the week after that, I have my second round of O12 ascend with two locations: Denmark again and Italy.