As you know WPC12 is taking place in Toronto this week.

First off, I heard people who booked their hotels last minute have pretty much 40 minutes commute each day because there is not a single room available in downtown; so note, next time there is a 16K event in town – book ahead ![]()
Couple of exciting announcements right on Monday with an opening show

Few of the most exciting announcements include:
- Office 365 Open: A new way for partners to sell the service, Office 365 Open is a pre-paid offer that enables partners to deliver packaged services with a single invoice and manage the customer relationship.
- Windows 8 RTM/GA: Windows 8 is going RTM the first week of August, and general availability at the end of October. Enterprise customers can get Windows 8 as early as August.
- Microsoft acquires Perceptive Pixel
: the maker of a 82 inch touch screen technology. Basically allowing you to work your productivity applications on a large screen replacing the whiteboard and increasing the interactiveness of presentations.
Lots of sessions related to Office 365 including:
- Seizing the Corporate Accounts
- Building your Office 365 Deployment Practice
- The Vision for Enterprise Social
Evening event for Microsoft Office Division took place at Corus Quay

The venue was great, lots showed up but due to many other parties running this evening not all of the SharePoint folks were there.
From the ones I had a chance to catch up I heard that many of them wish there was more info on the next version of SharePoint and there wasn’t enough to satisfy the hunger.
Speaking of hunger for information, the sessions on SharePoint were packed to the point that rooms were closed and not accessible to many of the attendees.
Some of the coolest announcement today included:
- Windows Server / Azure: A new CTP enables hosting providers to use their Windows Server data centers to deliver the same web site and virtual machine capabilities recently announced for Windows Azure.
- Switch to Hyper-V Program: Basically a new program to help customers transition from VMware infrastructure to Hyper-V. Including: guidance, training and software tools, Virtual Machine Migration Toolkit
- Windows Phone 8: new integration features and some new apps were showed off
Enjoy the rest of the week and keep up with latest announcements by checking this page regularly (hopefully it’s updated more frequently than people’s twitter
): http://www.microsoft.com/hk/presspass/search.aspx?yr=2012&mo=07
Enjoy!


