Many of you will know that a few weeks ago we had National Identity Fraud Prevention Week and clearly the FSB, with over 200,000 members has something to say on this. My own personal view is that identity theft, (which is one of the fastest growing crimes in the UK) is something we need to take very seriously. It seems that many of our smaller businesses are hanging onto sensitive documents instead of destroying them once done with - and worse still they're not doing enough to check on their customers and suppliers. 

Considering that the livelihoods of over 12 million employees are at risk this is something we should all be taking very seriously. I'm long past the point of trusting complete strangers who ring, fax or email and taking that attitude has saved me months of paperwork-chasing.  Your identity can be stolen in so many different ways, from email 'phishing' attacks  - for example FSBs members still respond to emails pretending to be from Barclays bank asking customers to update their personal details - to someone intercepting your post or even more complex scams where fraudsters can even manage to take over financial bonds in your name and open bank accounts.  One place I often point to for advice is www.stop-idfraud.co.uk which gives more advice and info to businesses about how to protect themselves. 

Businesses need to protect sensitive information not just about themselves but of their customers and clients too - sadly, research indicates that this isn't happening.

Here at Microsoft's TechEd conference, there is a definite air of excitement. With Vista just around the corner and a host of other goodies coming out of Microsoft "real soon now" they certainly have plenty to shout about. The weather in Barcelona isn't stunning but compared to the UK it's heaven, touching 20C.

There are over 4,000 developers here (I hasten to add almost but not quite exclusively male) and the week started off with an introduction comprising the usual adverts for Microsoft but perhaps more appealingly, a story about a young Pakistani girl who at 10 years of age got her Microsoft programming qualifications. After giving us some background, the speaker introduced her to us. Now 11 she's writing her own .Net programs (and to prove it she took the audience on a guided tour of her coding) and wants to start up a new Silicon Valley in Pakistan. Were it not that we could actually SEE her, one could be forgiven for thinking you were listening to an adult maybe in her early 20s. She got far more applause than anyone else.

Microsoft are clearly focused on the forthcoming Vista launch but they have so many other massively updated products coming up (Office 2007, Sharepoint 2007 to name but two) it was a pretty hard job to decide what to concentrate on. For those who've never been to TechEd, essentially this is week of solid learning. With over 250 sessions of one sort of another and hands-on labs you basically have to decide from a massive number of opportunities how to spend your week - there's no way to cover more than a small fraction of what's involved but it's fun trying.

Around the massive "Centre Convencions Internacional" is a wireless network to end all wireless networks - feeding as it does the many hundreds of laptops scattered all over. Even mid-sessions it's hard to miss techies everywhere frantically checking their email. As one speaker said, with this number of users it's a miracle it works at all, but works it does, as do the hundreds of hands-on lab computers which are provided to let users gain first-hand experience of the many new toys on display. It's not really like being overseas as despite the presence of people from all over the world, the conference itself is exclusively handled in the English language - handy for me as my Spanish is about as good as my French - I can just about manage to ask for a drink at the bar.

Bearing in mind that everything here is Microsoft-based, I had a laugh last night at one of the exhibition stands as a young chap and I were looking at the latest mobile phones - I asked him if he liked one particular model - his disgusted response in broken English: 'No, it's too big, and... it's Microsoft.' - I couldn't help thinking he'd come to the wrong exhibition!

On the programming side there is no doubt that users are in for a treat in the near future as Atlas, Microsoft's Ajax web development tools, finally comes within the grasp of mere mortal programmers. For the novice, Atlas provides a way around the constant page refreshes we see in traditional web pages and takes the experience a step nearer to that which you might expect from a desktop application. This is not new technology of course but the work that Microsoft has put into this makes it a lot easier for novice programmers to use this technology in their web sites. Time will tell but the claim is that the tools will create web pages that work on everything from Apple Macs through Netscape to the increasingly popular Firefox browser.

It's Wednesday morning and there is a long way to go, with sessions starting at 9am every morning and going on until mid-evening, I plan to return at the weekend full of enthusiasm and excitement. It won't take long for reality to bash it out of me but for now it's a rush that's definitely worth the trip and I'm enjoying every minute.