On Tuesday the 11th November the Microsoft UK agency team held an event in London for the design community. This was the first UK Web Agency event of the FY, organised by Microsoft and hosted at the Adam Street members club just off the strand in London.

The event was a huge success with over 70 attendees from a range of agencies including some of the NMA top 10, full service digital agencies and highly influential boutique agencies. The UK team were fortunate enough to be supported throughout this event by the leadership team from Microsoft Corp in Redmond; who were over to meet with some of the more active agencies and gain some notes from the field.

Michael McClary  from the UK team opened the session with some basic introductions before handing over to Darren McCormick who is the  WW lead for User Experience Evangelism.

Darren spoke about the importance of User Experience and how Microsoft is making a shift to really embrace the whole Design channel and make it easy for digital agencies to work with the rest of Microsoft platform to deliver truly innovative solutions to their customers.

Darren went on to explain the Microsoft Proposition in this space, correcting the common misconception that its all about Silverlight and eroding some of adobe's stronghold on the Rich Internet Application Marketplace. There is a much bigger story here and Silverlight plays just a small part, with other announcements that Microsoft have made regarding the web platform (Azure, Mesh, Live Services, Photosynth, etc) there is a huge opportunity for digital agencies to create incredibly compelling experiences for users that drive brand advocacy and consumer reach that extends far beyond the browser.

There was a big focus on the role that digital agencies have to play as things progress over the coming months and we explained how we see the agency value proposition and how this might be articulated to clients. Microsoft help drive customer advocacy by providing the fundamental basics of the platform and tools combined with the talented based craft from the agency space.Michael McClary then showed some of the live platform products and specifically the opportunity for agencies being able to plug into this platform. There are some amazing developments such as Live mesh and some of the more traditional live services that not only open up amazing innovation opportunities but also allow you to open your solution up to the 460 million Live users.

This event also showcased some of the incredible work that UK agencies are doing on the Microsoft platform already. Bob Thompson from StormID showed us the Colaab application that he has written using Silverlight. This app allows you to collaborate in a rich environment; share content and change documents all in real time and from within a browser on any device! Tim Hustler from Creative jar showed off some cool Silverlight web parts that they recently built for a sharepoint project for Navteq.

Paul Dawson from full service design agency Conchango gave an insight into how agencies can effectively partner with Microsoft and also gave a sneak peak at a proof of concept that they have been working on for Tesco in conjunction with Microsoft. This was a look at how people may interact with the Tesco online stores through their daily routine and showed off new features of Windows 7, live Mesh and Silverlight this was also demo'd at PDC earlier this year. Creative agency AllofUs then stepped up and showed some of the amazing forward thinking projects they have been working on including DoodleEarth - an innovative collaboration and note taking tool that is over-layed on Virtual earth. Monochrome showed us an amazing tool that they have written to convert Flash media to Silverlight ready .wmv files. all on the fly! this means you can run your old flash videos through a slick Silverlight player without having to convert the library in advance.

Darren McCormick closed out the event with some additional insights into the web platform strategy and most of the attendees managed to stay for a few drinks and networking afterwards. We all know this is where the real magic happens!