I’ve been extremely busy at work, which is the primary reason why I haven’t posted anything here for almost a whole month, I’m attending the SharePoint Conference this week, and this morning I saw Bill Gates talking excitedly about one of my favorite features of MOSS 2007 – the Business Data Catalog. (For a good write-up on the first day of the conference, see Mary Jo Foley’s article.) For those of you interested, go to the GotDotNet CodeGallery BDC project space for slidedecks and sample Application Definition files. More content will be posted there after Beta 2 becomes publicly available later this month. In addition, there’s a shared source development project for a Database Metadata Generator for the BDC will be posted later this week on the new CodePlex site.

   The ECM Team Blog will be launched within the next hour, assuming that I can stay awake long enough to post the initial blog entry. J And the Knowledge Network Team Blog will be launched late Tuesday ahead of Bill Gates keynote at the CEO Summit on Wednesday, when he’ll provide more details on how KN fits into Microsoft’s Enterprise Search strategy and solution offerings. I suspect that I’ll be helping to launch an Enterprise Search Team Blog shortly after that. Busy, busy, busy!

   Ever since taking the role of Community Lead for SharePoint last September, I’ve been wanting to update the SharePoint Community home page on the microsoft.com site. Well, it finally happened late last week, and I’m very happy with the new version of the page. I hope that you’ll find the page to be much more useful than the previous version. As always, please don’t hesitate to send me feedback on how the SharePoint community can be further improved.

   My next major community activity is to implement a new set of NNTP-based newsgroups to support discussions and Q&A for Beta 2, which will be publicly available later this month. The SharePoint MVPs and I debated the names and structure of the new newsgroups for several weeks before finally reaching an agreement (for the most part), so I’m very anxious to wrap up that project. As a preview, the following is the list of the new newsgroups:

• microsoft.public.sharepoint.general
• microsoft.public.sharepoint.setup_and_administration
• microsoft.public.sharepoint.design_and_customization
• microsoft.public.sharepoint.development_and_programming
• microsoft.public.sharepoint.server.excel_services
• microsoft.public.sharepoint.server.forms_services

   There are many more exciting developments on my plate that I believe will advance and grow the SharePoint community, but this is all that I have time to write about for now.