Jeff Jackson and Andy MacDonald started the morning off with the Introducing ArcGIS Explorer 900 seminar before a full room. Here's how it looked as the morning started.

After an overview of Explorer's capabilities, which were sprinkled with demos, Jeff and Andy delved into what most people came to hear about - Explorer 900's configuration and customization capabilities. Andy and Jeff highlighted application configurations, an easy way to customize Explorer for specific users or workflows.

Application configurations are files (.ncfg) that define the functionality available in Explorer, and how it is organized. These are easy to create, can be centrally managed within an organization, and don't require programming. Configurations can be edited and managed via the Application Configuration Manager, a portion of which is shown below.

Developers were happy to learn that custom tools could be created using a native .NET API via Explorer's SDK, which is a separate download but also free.

We also appreciate what Dave Bouwman had to say about things.

And here's Jeff and Andy after the seminar, fielding questions in the ESRI showcase area.