So today was the first event of an Academic Tour through The Netherlands. The kickoff of the Academic Tour was held at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and was pretty successful if you ask me. There were about 60 students attending and a bunch of Microsoft employees.

A couple of presentations were given one of which by Paul van Wingerden about Business Intelligence mainly about what it is, why it’s useful for large enterprises and how you can manipulate large piles of data into meaningful information for your company.

Secondly there was a presentation about the Unified Communications platform provided by Microsoft, and Matthijs Hoekstra had some pretty cool demo’s and showed a really cool app which leveraged the ‘presence’ of people using things like Messenger and Live Communications. Very cool stuff.

Finally we had some good conversations with students about the Imagine Cup and Microsoft in general. Oh and before I forget there was an announcement which basically means that if you’re a Dutch student, you can get a FREE hosting on Windows Server 2008 including and also FREE domain name! For more information about that, click here.

All in all a pretty good event, so see you at the next Academic Event at the University of Delft 19th of November.