It's a GO

We have set a date for the Launch, MOSSIG will happen. The 27th of June will be the first meeting of our new User Group for Microsoft Office System users and Developers. Yes Users and Developers. We will present topics of interest for users, and tell developers how they can build, deploy and develop their business (make more money ;-)) using Office System. Obviously right now the focus will be largely on the release of 2007 Microsoft Office System (what a bad name....) as this has been released as a public beta last week. Tim Wragg has got all the links of interest in his last post.

Last week was an interesting one, I was at the Mobile DevCon here in Melbourne and was very impressed with what MS is doing in both the Mobile space (we all got a copy of CE 6.0) and for XP embedded. Did you know there is actually a POS for .Net? A set of .net classes to work with all kinds of point of sale devices like cash drawers, card readers, line displays etc. A very nice way to make use of these devices without having to know all about serial connections and escapes codes. You can download the SDK, it works on XP so everybody can use it.

That same day I also did my first talk in public here in Melbourne talking to the Sharepoint User Group people about what Software Objectives used Sharepoint and VSTO for in our custom solutions. A small crowd, no wonder because of all the conferences going on that day and the soccer match between the national teams of Australia and Greece, but enthousiastic response to the talk.

My next gig is at the Developers Conference in Ballarat on June the 17th, actually I will do two talks there. I will present on 2007 Microsoft Office System for developers and from a business perspective.
The business talk will be about how businesses can save money using the 2007 version, the developers talk will be about how developers can make money providing the solutions for their users and customers.
Last I heard was that registrations are coming in in large numbers so be sure to register now for this excellent free conference. You'll find the details at the link above.
Now I'm off to install the new beta on our servers here, I'll let you know what my experiences with that exercise were like in the next week or so.

Stay tuned,
Ed