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My plan to attend the Vista launch at the Moscone in downtown San Francisco didn’t push through. To my dismay, the registration was already closed since friday last week and the wait list has reached its capacity.

Since I don’t have things to do at that time, I checked Microsoft’s website for other events and found one at the JW Mariott which is just a few blocks away from the Vista launch venue. The event was about the role of software in a small business environment. I made a reservation, printed out a map (I’m bad at directions) and went on my way.

I arrived 30 minutes early at the venue and I met quite a number of people while waiting for the event to start. There’s this gentleman from a software consulting company, a representative from HP business solutions, a nice lady from the Oakland Chamber of Commerce (I forgot their names, sorry), Ms. Angelica of YTB International and Sanjay of VMWare.

Sorry for the crappy pics. I forgot to bring my digicam.

The speaker of the event was Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft’s Business Division. He discussed on how software can help employees work efficiently and increase productivity. This is in association with the release of their Vista OS and Office 2007 productivity suite.Product demonstration was done by Eric Gilmore, Product Manager of Microsoft. He presented the new features of both Vista and Office such us the new ribbon menu, a powerful preview tool, built in image editor in office, and many more.Many were suprised and happy about the feature about the integrated Paypal option within Office. Another one, which is a welcomed feature by Ebay Powerseller which simplifies accounting and inventory work. At the middle of the discussion, it was annouced that we’ll be getting a free full version copy of Windows Vista Business Edition. How nice is that? A lot people including myself was happy and to top it off, they gave another free item.

I can’t wait to install this and try it out.

They gave away a free retail Office 2007 Professional Edition for the first 100 attendees and I was one of the lucky early birds of the event. I know… its not as fancy as the Vista Swag Bag but getting these free stuff is still nice.

So far I’m happy that I got a free lunch on the event, a free Windows Vista worth $200, and Office 2007 worth $450. To think that I only spent $5.80 for the roundtrip train fare. :P

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Blog, Event. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.