No swim but still up at 0645 in time to get the 0730 bus over to the conference centre this morning. Good grief.
Which turns out to be not entirely essential since the first event of the day, the Keynote Speech from Sanjay Parthasarathy and Jean-Philippe Courtois isn't until 1030. And then it's one of the more boring keynotes I've ever heard - and I've heard my fair share and then some of these over the years. In fact, I didn't make a single note about anything during the while 90 minutes - normally there's at least two or three noteworthy items in one of these things.
Essentially, this year Microsoft are moving from developing the new technologies to showing us how to do cool things with them; telling us about companies that tried and failed to do something for a year with a rival technology that they managed to accomplish within six weeks using Microsoft kit. Which is cool, and means that those of us sitting in front of computer screens all day may see some interesting things - albeit by and large only if we're sitting in front of a screen owned by a decent-sized and switched-on company.
After lunch - shredded beetroot salad, a whiff of chicken - comes the first proper session of the week, all about XML in Microsoft Word.
XML is eXtensible Mark-up Language, and if you need to know more than this then you probably already do. It's a native format inside all the new Office 2003 applications and allows some very cool things.
For end users already familiar with Word and so on, not a huge amount has changed on first sight. However, you'll probably soon come across the 'task pane' down the right-hand side of the document. Office XP has something a little like this already - when you click File/New, for example, you may see a list of possibilities down the right-hand side of the window.
Now you'll start seeing more in this window, like items related to the content of your document - put there by you, by those who've set up your system or from elsewhere. It's a large extension of the smart tags technology and will give you, for example, an in-place reference library to find out more about whatever it is you're currently working on.
It will allow for much more stringent content validation for forms and other documents, the insertion of 'clever' data like constantly-updating stock data or weather information right there in your document. Information will be much more readily re-purposed from other sources and you can have user-based editing permissions - so a weekly report can have the date and body edited by one group but it has to be checked by a manager and approved for distribution by a director, for example.
The new rights management built into Office 2003 (and for which you'll also need a Windows 2003 server) will then give specific distribution permissions - not just detailing to whom it can be sent but what recipients can then do with that information: read-only, limited time read, read and print, read and edit and so on. This, Microsoft says, will make it much easier to stop leaks - something they're concerned about themselves since their Redmond HQ does bear more than a passing resemblance to a sieve.