After ntpro’s Twitter entry today questioning my were ‘abouts I figured it was time to jump back on!  It’s been a busy few months since my last blog entry back in January.  Since then we piloted the first global 24hr virtual event titled TechDays Defy all Challenges that was run by Steven Salazar on my team.  Although we only registered 5,000 developers worldwide the event was a huge success in terms of the reaction from the community and the quality of the content &speakers.  We didn’t know if we could actually pull it off an online global event running 24hrs with 80 live sessions but the pilot was a success so you can expect more in the coming year.   Back on the TechEd front, Susan Boyd on my team who is responsible for TechEd Online has moved mountains this year to re design and develop the site from the ground up over a 6 month period. The site was designed by Blast Radius out of Vancouver BC and is scheduled to launch tomorrow morning after countless hours of work by multiple partners across many different event and social media systems (EventPoint’s CommNet system, InDepth’s blog aggregation system, TriDigital’s media encoding technology and SilverLight player, etc) to achieve a first class experience.  The crown jewel of the new experience is the global content library which will feature content from across the TechEd events from current and past years for viewing on-demand and download.  All of this content will be available starting with individuals registered for TechEd North America and from there we will be opening it up to TechEd attendees from around the world.  One of the coolest parts of this project on the back end has been the migration of our media hosting to Microsoft’s own edge computing network which is the network of data farms around the globe that host Windows Live Services, MSN, Hotmail, etc, which we previously didn’t have access to. I expect the streaming media experience to be fantastic.  The end result is a spectacular online experience that I think everyone will be excited to see come online….more to come tomorrow on this as we announce the launch!!

After all of the craziness of the past year however, we are now at my most favorite time of the year which is the week before we start load-in of TechEd North America, AKA the week prior to the circus coming to town.   As we move back to a combined event and come back home to the west coast I get energized by the buzz in teh community as everyone builds out their personal session schedules and chat on Twitter and Facebook about what will be happening onsite.   Last week we had the traditional Track PM toast which marked our last meeting together as a planning team before coming onsite.   An enormous thank you goes out to this year’s team who has been dedicated to this event from day during a very tough time for the event industry due to the economy.  Cheers to TechEd 2009 and look out for the fun to begin tomorrow with the rebirth of TechEd Online!