Welcome to Vienna for the 19th CIRED Conference & Exhibition After Nice, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Turin, CIRED continues its tour of the European cities offering the best environment to promote its role of leading forum where the electricity distribution community meets. The brand new ReedMesse Wien in the artistic and historical city of Vienna offers all the up-to-date facilities to guarantee a successful 19th CIRED Conference & Exhibition and to fulfill the wishes of the CIRED community. Vienna further has convenient connections with the whole world and is also ideally located to attract delegates from the new European countries. The main guidelines leading to the 2007 program were: To even better and closer fulfill the need for information on the ongoing changes in the electricity distribution business, in particular with the full opening of the electricity and gas markets in most European countries in 2007, as well as the neeed for exchanges between all interested parties in this changing business (utilities, manufacturers, research centers, universities, consultants, regulators, authorities, …); To capitalise on the success factors and on the appreciated changes of the recent  conferences, while taking into account suggestions from delegates; To promote the posters sessions, by an adequate and valorising location and by generalising to all six sessions organised guided tours of the posters; To keep providing each day an event of interest for each theme, but clarifying the programme and avoiding some overlaps by organising the tutorials and the technical visits out of the three general session days; To facilitate and encourage networking possibilities through all the event to reinforce CIRED's community. I would like to thank here warmly the many actors whose appreciated efforts and enthousiasm contributed to the elaboration of this outstanding program: the National and Liaison Committees, the Technical Committee, the Directing Committee, the authors whose interest resulted in a new record number of abstract proposals (907). The CIRED event has also been made possible thanks to my colleagues of the Organising Committee who are making their very great efforts to guarantee a very successfull CIRED2007, meeting the needs and the expectations of all the parties: delegates, authors, keynote speakers, session's chairmen & rapporteurs, sponsors and exhibitors. On behalf of the organising committee, Jean-Pierre Connerotte Chairman