Trip to Microsoft Campus in Reading

Today I drove down to Reading (pronounced "redding") for a Sharepoint 2007 seminar. The system blew me away. I think the search crawler complete with knowledge mapping email account scanner is the most impressive part. Out of the box it will allow you to scann your company's email boxes for key words and associations to quickly help you find knowledgable people an any subject indexed. It has privacy features as well, such as a user filtering what content can be indexed. Enough of that boring techy stuff...

The campus is in a beautiful setting along the river Thames, just northwest of London. I stayed in what must be one of the oldest Quality Inns around, built in 1890. Of course I don't know when it became a QI, but it just seems wrong.

The drive was so perfect. Blue skies, colorful sunset, hot air balloon drifting overhead. One thing the British really seamed to have figured out, is they don't have nasty looking utility poles and wires strung about. Also, they tend to keep the greenways green, and sprawl kept to a minimum. One thing they haven't figured out, is how to put garbage into a trash can (or recycle etc). There amount of litter here is astonnishing, and you never see volunteers cleaning any of it.