PDC track owners are blogging...

I've noticed that a couple of the track owners on our virtual content team have started blogging about PDC.

Mike Fitzmaurice is one of the track owners for our Office 12 and Sharepoint content.  He talked a bit about why he's excited to have a signifcant Office and Sharepoint presence at PDC this year.  I'm also psyched to have a significant Office presence at PDC this year.  Take a look at the preview session titles.  In addition to some of the obvious sessions, like "Outlook Integration: Building Messaging and Collaboration Solutions with New "Outlook 12" Extensibility", I think people will be pleasantly surprised by the amount of focus the Office team is bringing towards enabling developers to really leverage O12 as the platform for their own custom solutions.  Note "Advancements in Document, Content, and Data Storage in Windows SharePoint Services "v3" Platform" and "Developing an End-to-End Document Workflow Solution Using Office Client and Server Technologies ", for example

Brad Abrams is working on the Tools and Languages track, and since we posted the preview of PDC session titles, he's added a bit of commentary on some of his favorites.  I agree with Brad that our talks on language innovations are going to be very interesting.  Paul Vick thinks the VB content he's pulling together for PDC wil "blow your socks off".

The Data and Systems track has a great team behind it, with Tom Rizzo (whose blog seems to be down, but I found the link and text from Niels,) Euan Garden and Matt Nunn as the driving forces.  These guys have provided some great feedback in our weekly track meetings, despite having a lot of work to do around TechEd.  Maybe now that they are past that event, we'll see more PDC blogging from them...

Our next track meeting, on Wednesday, will be the first time we look at a complete session, with best effort session titles from each of the tracks.  We'll review each session as a group to make sure we all agree it's PDC calibre and fits our goals for the event, which means we'll probably find a few to cut or combine together, and make room for additional content that the track owners think we ought to cover.  Then right after that meeting, I have to scramble over to a review with execs to show what progress we've made, and demonstrate that our PDC content is on track to be excatly the kind of strategic platform roadmap that we promised it would be back in March.

By the end of the month, we should have a high degree of confidence in our session list and speakers, and so I hope that starting in July you'll some of the speakers start to blog as they think through how to best create their presentations and demos (and hands on labs too!).