Out of all the Microsoft products, I am the biggest fan of Exchange Server. Exchange is a messaging and collaborative technology, developed by Microsoft and its latest incarnation, Microsoft Exchange 2007, works beautifully with the entire range of Office Suite. Microsoft Exchange also features the "Direct Push" technology, wherein email and other items are synced in real time on Windows Mobile devices. In other words, Exchange is a truly unique product and there are practically no direct competitors to it in the market.

Exchange is mostly targetted at corporate environments, however, its feature set is best suited for any average user, due to the seamless integration between the client and the server portions, intuitive UI and support for various kinds of access (desktop client, web, mobile). There are various other reasons, and I will let this amazing blog post do the explanation. Since it is practically impossible for a home user to run an Exchange server environment due to hardware, bandwidth and licensing cost constraints, a whole bunch of companies offer, what is known as "Hosted Exchange" environment. I personally run an Exchange server on a virtualised environment, mainly for test and learning purposes, however, I am looking into switching to a hosted environment. There are many players out there, but I am looking at Sherweb's single-user friendly offer. If I do end up trying them out, I will put up a future blog post detailing my experiences.

I have been a bit late in reporting about the end of the MVP summit due to the pending work which was waiting for me on my arrival to Halifax. This was by far the best MVP summit I have attended. Starting off with Bill Gates' keynote speech, through technical sessions and product group dinners, I got to meet a lot of MVPs from all around the world and I learnt a lot about different products coming up in the next couple of months.

I am really excited about the upcoming Games for Windows and integration of Live! for Windows so that PC gamers can play against XBOX gamers under supported titles. I was also fortunate to preview some live gaming footage of the upcoming PC game Crysis. The graphics effects were simply mind blowing since they took advantage of DirectX 10.

Apart from the technical session, I met so many other MVPs and really smart Microsoftemployees (who impressed me to no ends) and got to socialize with them all. One of the dinners was in the Museum of Flight and boy was it cool !

Alas, now a lot of pending work await me and hence a detailed post about the MVP summit might come later on during the week. Thanks MVP Program for such an awesome time !

With a little bit of sunshine, the 2007 MVP Global Summit started today at the Washington State Convention and Trade Centre with registration of the attendees. I also got to visit the first Starbucks on Pike Street with MVP Gary Tsang. All-in-all, the starting has been good and I am looking forward to Bill Gates' keynote speech alongwith other executive sessions tomorrow.

After a 5+ hour freezing cold flight from Halifax to Seattle (without any food), which included a connecting flight from Vancouver to Seattle in a tiny DASH 8 aircraft, I finally checked-in to Grand Hyatt Seattle this evening. I spent the last two days with my friend, an ex-MVP and a current Microsoft full-time employee.

The 2007 Global MVP Summit starts tomorrow with the registration. Some unique stats for this summit (gracfully stolen from MVP Jason's blog) are as follows:

• The MVP Summit is the largest event held at the Microsoft campus
• 1889 attendees are registered to attend
• 88 countries will be represented (based on registrations)...including for the first time: Algeria, Andorra, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cyprus, El Salvador, Gibraltar, Honduras, Latvia, Morocco, Nepal, Oman, Rwanda, Tunisia, UAE, Uruguay and Vietnam
• 533 Sessions will be delivered
• 956 Microsoft employees pre-registered as speakers/attendees
• 10 Microsoft Executives and 4 Technical Fellows

Bill Gates kicks off the summit on Tuesday with his keynote at the Washington State Convention Centre. Looking forward to the next week !