I have been teaching more than 60 developers now on Office 12 (client and server) and for a lot of them it is their first experience with SharePoint. Often I hear stories about custom made applications in the area of human resources, document management, compliance management and so on using all kinds of technologies except SharePoint. Even today, a participant came to me saying that he was really impressed about the capabilities of WSS v3 and the way you can now completely customize and extend it the way you want it. His company is thinking about rewriting their human resources application as a rich client but now he is convinced that SharePoint is a far better platform since it gives you out-of-the-box all of the infrastructure you need. With all of the extensibility options, he sees real opportunities for them to package their solution and create a compelling new version of their product. I like these comments because it gives me a good feeling that with WSS v3 we are definitely going to have a new wave of SharePoint-based applications and solutions. As I see it, WSS v3 is going to be enormously popular and there will be a wide adoption of it. The feedback from the students just confirms that feeling.

Doug, the technology specialist working in Redmond and our contact person regarding O12 and the Ascend content, has received the same feedback from the participants of the US workshops. He also points to a list of companies that today already have adopted SharePoint and have built solution around or on top of it. We all foresee that this list is going to grow in the next couple of years.