Last month was the SAF2008 in San Francisco, CA. They have had some impressive speakers (Simon Guest, Jack Greenfield, ...) and topics (Delivering Architectural Guidance, Growing Architect Communities, ...).

What strikes me most is the focus on the cloud platform in a very business functional way. The presentation on Multi-Enterprise Business Applications is a great example of that, where you see a story you realize straight-away and just a few slides later you see where the internet service bus comes in. The good thing the MEBA sessions also notices is that ISB is just in its early stages. There are services to be added to create manageable and trustable processes in the cloud, which are described as "Higher Level Services" taking care of

• Party Management
• Service Choreography
• Business Process
• Community Management

Great stuff that gets me thinking...

The slides are available on the new Architect Center. http://architect-center.com/groups/saf/media/default.aspx

Last year's content seems to be still available (including recordings) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb267380.aspx