The "Ready for a New Day" Launch Tour made its 2nd stopover in an Indian city in New Delhi yesterday. I attended the business event where Microsoft showcased Windows Vista, Office 2007 System & Exchange Server 2007 to businesses and how they can impact Business Productivity and "lower costs" .

Doug Hauger, Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft India delivered the keynote address. It was a quite informative event overall. The bits I liked more were the EPM presentation by Frank Galahad, the Windows Vista deployment session by Richa Patni and the session on multi-lingual support from the public sector track which I attended simply out of curiosity and was amazed to find out that Vista will be made available in 13 Indian languages. Although I am always "for" English until universal translators come out of the StarTrek universe and are commercially mass produced, it's great to know that Microsoft is investing quite a lot in supporting multi-lingual solutions.

Among the disappointing things about the event were - there was no developers track which has infact been there in the "Across America" Tour. And neither were any sessions catering to Small Businesses. That's particularly disappointing because I was representing a small business myself. I'm know there isn't much utility of Project Portfolio Server 2007 for any small business. But I'm sure a session dedicated to Exchange & SharePoint Server in a small business environment would have been appreciated even in the American Tour as I found out that were no small business session in them either. And a couple of speakers weren't as good as you would expect, I couldn't help but laugh when this gentleman from Southern India (I'm not judging his technical caliber) would pronounce environment as - "envy" + "Ron" (as in Ron Howard) + "met" (although if you pay attention you could hear the faint accent on "N"). I firmly believe a good command over spoken language is a must for any public speaker. And there was this lady (the room was packed, so you gotta know she was a looker) but I rather not say her name for the sake of decency (I am a nice guy impersonating as a bad boy), but her session on Vista security (not actually the topic of her session) was really appalling and I'm not acting out like Simon Cowell as I have just got off watching American Idol it's because she deviated so much from her agenda into topics that were from other speakers and there were many instances where you could tell she seemed a little lost.