From 28 to 29 April 2009, participants and ECDC staff met in Stockholm to discuss the main strategic issues regarding surveillance activities and practices and decide on the operational directions to follow in the near future. The main issues to be addressed were related to the implementation of case definitions, establishment of a process to review proposed changes in TESSy metadata, procedure on access to TESSy data by third parties, and the implementation of geo-coding, molecular surveillance and outbreak reporting.