Day 2 of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. I attended a focus group session in the morning on how businesses are using social media tools to help market their products and brands. Blogging (like this), Twitter and YouTube really are becoming mainstream marketing methods and mediums. You don’t have to use them, but then you don’t have to market too. The questions is do you want to hold onto or grow your market share. If yes then you need to look at the marketing mediums you have at your disposal. You will likely see more from us in the future in this area.

The keynote address was great. Saw some great previews of upcoming technologies. Of note was the demonstration of the new Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and how you can use it as a data analytics tool. Some companies spend a lot of money having dashboards built or one-off reports built by the IT staff. The new Excel (coming out in the new year likely) lets you work with millions of rows of data and save the file to a SharePoint site so it can be used as a dashboard right from the web browser. So users will be able to create their own spreadsheets with data slicing and dicing capabilities and use them and publish them for the whole company to take advantage of. You don’t even need Excel on your computer, you can edit and work with the data right from the browsers. AND two people can edit and update the same file at the same time. Talk about collaboration.

I sat in on a session reviewing the new Windows 7. This should be the version of Windows that breaks the will of people to hold onto Windows XP. Not that you have to upgrade but currently people are making a conscious effort to not use Windows Vista and paying extra for it. Windows 7 and its features, ease of use and support for existing software will hopefully break that barrier.

So it was a long day. Not sure I will have the energy to take a walk along Bourbon Street, but then again maybe I will!