Managing director of Microsoft Australia, Steve Vamos along with John Roberts from Gartner kicked off the day with the Keynote address.  This set the tone for the day, with the general message being that Microsoft is going to provide us with the tools which will enable the company’s most important asset, its people, to be more productive. 

Nothing Earth shattering there.   But the lighting and music was impressive.

Moving on to break out sessions, I checked out Network Access Protection.  Simply this process protects your core application servers, having connected computers first validate with a boundary server by sending a “statement of health” token.
The idea is to stop laptops that have picked up malware, spyware or other nasties, from then infecting the entire network as soon as they reconnect to the domain.

Other sessions focused on the further integration of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007.  But, as nice as this all looked with the demo’s going smoothly.  It was hard to drop the “it will never be this good in reality” thought. 
There were also some awkward moments, when a question from the floor asked the obvious, what the benefit was in upgrading both Office and Vista at the same time?
The answer seems to boil down to the integrated desktop search facility.  Hmmm Google Desktop anybody?