Day 1 started with a keynote presentation of Eric Rucker talking about the new digital workstyle and Microsoft's vision and strategy. Since he is program manager of Microsoft Access he showed a number of things in Access. And I must confess, the more I see about Access, the more I am impressed. One of the major design goals with the new version was to make Access accessible to more people, make it easier to get started and help people in a more intelligent way while they are designing their database, queries, forms and reports. Cool stuff.

Here are a couple of Access resources to get you started:

• Microsoft Access Product Team Blog
• Access on the Office Site

Next, I attended a session delivered by Todd Bleeker on 'Migrating from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007'. Todd is a very energetic trainer and you don't get bored one minute. I hope he will join us at TechEd Europe instead of DevConnections. The session was of course way too early in the whole program. This is one of the negative points with this conference - they should have planned basic introductory topics in the beginning and then slowly move to more advanced SharePoint 2007 topics. In my courses and workshops, the majority of participants are very new to SharePoint 2007 and many things have changed. This is definitely the case here in Phoenix and basic concepts like features, content types, ... are very very new to them. That's why the organizers should have added a couple of What's new in SharePoint 2007 sessions before starting with the real meat.

But back to Todd's session. Upgrading and migrating is of course a topic that is super important and we are not really able to demonstrate a lot of things today with beta 2. But he gave a good overview on the various scenarios already documented by Microsoft on the Migration Center on MSDN.

One thing that I just want to mention here is the following. WSS v3, the platform, and MOSS 2007, the solutions and services, introduce important changes in the way you store content and documents, manage all of this, integrate it with external data sources, index and search it, and plenty more. Just an upgrade of what you have today is maybe not going to be the perfect solution. I am writing this because I had a meeting last week with a representative from a big oil company in Saudi Arabia and we are embarking with them on an upgrade of their portals and team sites to the new MOSS 2007. In the beginning he was just thinking about an upgrade, but now he is convinced that we first need to analyze and design how we are going to structure and store the content and documents, what customizations are needed, what extensions need to be provided with features, what workflows are needed, what business processes need to be supported, and much more. In the long run, this is going to be a better approach.

Next, I had my own session on the Building Web Parts the Smart Way. Basically the same session as I did for Advisor and DevConnections in April. Find the demos over here. In the afternoon I had my session on What can InfoPath do for you?. I had a full room but noticed that there is still a lot of evangelization to be done on the powerful features and scenarios with InfoPath combined with SharePoint. Here are the slides. No demos to download since I basically did everything from scratch.

Finally, Tony Bierman (part of the SharePoint Solutions gang) gave a detailed presentation on solutions, site definitions and features in WSS v3. Interesting but definitely hard to follow all of the XML slides. A more demo-like approach explaining and demonstrating features, site definitions and solutions was I think a better approach (certainly at the end of a busy day). But he knows his stuff!