Greetings from Lotusphere!

Yes, as the team releases the beta of 2007 tools, I am here in Orlando suffering through all the sunlight and warmth...

 I've been attending Lotusphere since it started 14 years ago, but only as a Microsoft employee for the last two. Last year was shortly after I joined Microsoft, so I was pretty nervous about how people would approach me, but this year, I'm not nervous at all! (Also, no one has thrown anything at me....yet.) This has been a really good conference so far - John Glenn Neil Armstrong was the opening speaker at the Keynote yesterday morning and I got to learn and see the upcoming Lotus products and hear IBM declare that Lotus Notes is now the official email product from IBM.

 What's been different this year from a Microsoft perspective is the number of people approaching me and telling me that they are changing their business model to incorporate SharePoint 2007 into their business plans and practices. A couple of business partners mentioned to me that they are really impressed with it and are beginning to develop and work with SharePoint as a new part of their business. This reinforces my belief that the new version of SharePoint really is well thought out and makes sense for any collaborative environment - and to hear others who have been involved in collaborative technology agreeing with me always makes me happy (anyone agreeing with me generally makes me happy, by the way). I'd recommend anyone that is considering IBM Websphere Portal to take a look at what Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 , Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (aka "MOSS") and Office 2007 have to offer. (You can use earlier versions of Office as the fat client for SharePoint, but you don't get all of the kewl features unless you're using the latest and greatest, of course).

 Also, I've noticed a bunch of people are posting questions and issues with the beta on here as comments. You'll get a lot quicker and better response if you post them in the Feedback mechanism on the Connect site where you downloaded the software from. That automatically generates tracking issues\bugs that get routed to the appropriate folks to investigate.

If you're at Lotusphere and have any questions about SharePoint or the beta tools, feel free to grab me!

Later,

Amy

Edited 2/3 cause I mixed up my astronauts.