MBS R&D Open House

Today (08/22/2005) we had MBS R&D Open house event in Redmond.  This was open to all Microsoft Employees and marked with visits by Executives including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Doug Burgum and many others. Satya Nadella , the head of MBS R&D, was there throughout the day ( and yesterday for the dry runs). We showcased lots of cool tools and technologies on how we leverage technology at its best to  provide great business value to partners and customers. This included our current products, upcoming release versions and our future road map stuffs and this was done in  Tradeshow format. We had around 20 booths demonstrating innovations across – Small Biz, CRM and ERP. We also had in theatre presentations and guided tours. This was a great opportunity for employees from other groups to see how we use other Microsoft products/technology in the context of business application scenarios. I demoed Office Integration and Ease of deployment of Enterprise Portal being built for the Axapta 4.0 release. We basically showed how we allow developers and ITpros to use their familiar office and SharePoint tools to extend, author and provision EP sites, yet at the same time leveraging the rich metadata store of Axapta. This was well received and I am very proud on behalf of the entire time that we were able to pull it together successfully. We also had lots of fun events and Q&A/talks with Steve and Doug.