Welcome Office Developers!

My name is Steve Fox, and I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft who's in charge of the Office Developer Conference (ODC) Client Development track. My main focus here at MSFT is engaging with customers (e.g. developers, business decision makers, architects, etc.) to do two main things: i) to teach developers about Office Business Applications (OBAs) - which includes client-side development through Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and SharePoint development and ii) to gather feedback from developers to help improve future versions of our product. I attend a lot of the developer conferences, so if I have not met you before I hope that we can meet and chat at ODC.

I'll be posting regularly as we move towards ODC and will keep you updated with information about each of the sessions and their speakers, any updates on changes or news you should know about, and anything else that I feel is useful. At the outset, I will say that this ODC is shaping up to be very exciting. The proposition of developing applications that extend from the client to SharePoint and beyond (e.g. integrating SAP, MSFT Dynamics, PeopleSoft, etc. into the information worker experience) is one that has become a reality - and for many companies a major IT investment. For those that attend, you'll be able to learn more about how to do some of this and you'll learn what is coming in future versions of Office - a sort of sneak peak.

Well, I just wanted this to be a welcome message and to let you know that I'll be posting more information as soon as I have it. So, please check back regularly!

Until then, have a great day!

Steve