Welcome back!

Hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year break, although it quickly feels like a distant memory! I think I've lived in England too long when I am not able to refrain from mentioning the weather and the fact that it has been freezing with snow and frost the last couple of weeks. When the warm weather finally came around it had the audacity to bring rain with it, so hopefully Dallas in May will offer warmer climes!

Bringing the mind back to more pressing matters - MFWorld! As promised we are back with plenty of exciting news to talk about following the festive break.

Several of my colleagues will soon be joining in to keep you informed on some of the latest updates on the agenda and the activities surrounding MFW '09 - so stay tuned!

To kick off the new year - here is something I think you may find interesting. Micro Focus has been talking about doing things a little differently this year, and we are standing by this rhetoric! This year, we opened up the ExpressIT '09 t-shirt design contest, to invite design ideas for the free t-shirt that you will receive as a delegate at MFW'09. And since this is something you are going to be wearing on every conceivable occasion, we would like to invite you to vote on your favourite designs!

Doing this is quite simple - we have created a Flickr Group where we have uploaded all the submitted designs. Follow this link to our ExpressIT '09 Flickr Group, to view all the contest entries. To vote, login to flickr with your Yahoo ID and either leave a comment or add the picture to your faves. You may vote on more than one design, and these votes will be taken into account when we make the final decision on the winning entry.

Oh - and by the way, if you have a cool idea for a t-shirt design then you may want to consider entering the contest yourself. It is open to everybody except Micro Focus employees and their immediate family members (sorry guys!), with the deadline for designs now extended to February 15.

So what are you waiting for, don't you want to have a hand in the must-wear fashion item of 2009?!

See you in Dallas!!