Last week we spent a day-long meeting scrubbing through the “close to final” session list of 420 breakout sessions to be presented at TechEd North America this year.  This year we broke a record with the number of submissions that came through from the community and Microsoft product groups with over 1,600 submissions.  The submissions were impressive and going through the mass of sessions was a daunting task.   We will begin release sessions to the web the first week of February and speakers will begin receiving notifications on Friday, Jan 30 of their session acceptances and declines.   At a time when we are seeing a number of tech conferences being cancelled and other ones struggling to survive it’s good to see the interest in TechEd continue to climb which can only be attributed to quality content, top-notch speakers and experts onsite that customers tell is are the core reasons they are able to make the pilgrimage each year; well than there is the party too of course:-)