What a way to kick off the Future of the Desktop Tour!!

I REALLY love coming to Montreal.  Having lived in Ottawa and frequently visited Montreal for both personal and business reasons over the years before I moved to Toronto, the city never looses its appeal.  It has great people, great food, and we always have a great time.  For these reasons I am really happy that we decided to kick off the Future of the Desktop Tour in Montreal. 

The response to this tour and the interest in Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System is phenomenal!!  Over 1000 people registered for the event - so many in fact that we could not fit you all into one theater and had to open up a second theater to accomodate the large number of attendees.  The really cool thing is that both theaters were completely full!!  Just an amazing response from Montreal so we have to say THANK YOU!!

Montreal, as well as kicking off the tour, received a special keynote from Antoine Leblond, the Corporate Vice President, Office Program Management at Microsoft head office in Redmond.  Antoine spoke of Microsoft's vision for the Office System and how Office 2007 delivers on that vision.  He also took some excellent questions from the audience and really helped to kick the tour off!

Bruce and I spent the rest of the day going over technical features of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System.  The afternoon sessions focused on how you can build a virtual test lab to ensure your applications will work with Windows Vista and Office 2007.  Finally, we showed how to image your Windows Vista refernece desktop and deploy it in your organization.  All and all, a jam packed day with lots of information.

It was great way to get the Future of the Desktop Tour kicked off, but don't take my word for it.  I received this post earlier from Florian Fullum, who attended the event and who had this to say:

I was at today’s tour (Montreal), it was amazing what I learned about Office 2007, Vista, and virtual server 2005 R2. The search feature was awesome. I wish it was available today as I have a customer that could really use it.
I can’t wait to get my hands on these products and install them.
If you were not sure if you should go, I highly recommend that you do.
Bruce Cowper and Damir Bersinic were superb and I congratulate them on their presentation
Keep it up, and am looking forward to the next TechNet tour

To Florian and to many of you to whom I spoke at the event, I want to say thanks for your kind words.   Both Bruce and I had a blast and look forward to coming back.  Merci beaucoup!!