EVO community launch

Wednesday 24th January 2007 saw the community launch of EVO (Exchange, Vista, Office) at Thames Valley Park in Reading otherwise known as TVP or Microsoft Headquarters.

The event was set up by Nathan Winters (http://www.mmmug.co.uk/blogs/nweb/default.aspx is his blog). Nathan is not a Microsoft employee (at the time of writing :-) ) but a consultant specialising in Exchange Server who runs the Microsoft Messaging and Mobility User Group.

There were half a dozen other people co-hosting the event but it would be unfair to pick some of them out and not others and the keynote was done by some guy called Jon Honeyball. Apparently he dabbles with computers. Kudos to Nathan for getting Jon to keynote it.

The event was laid on by Microsoft to the extent of the room and the advertising and the excellent services of the in house events team providing food, drink, registration and so on.

The amount of work that had gone into preparing it was immense and the slides are all being made available. Nathan's Exchange ones are at: http://www.mmmug.co.uk/files/14/evo_launch_meeting_24th_jan_07/default.aspx which does not sound much, but the 250 attendees can show the slides to their colleagues and bosses without having to guess anything.

There were demonstrations of Office desktop and Office server products and at 5pm when you'd expect only the hard core to remain, well over half of the people were still seated. That alone means the event was a success even if the feedback scores are low.

Would I attend the event again? Absolutely. Nice one guys - an excellent start to 2007.