Tech•Ed Rocks!

Hynesite is one of several hands-on lab partners that support TechEd events worldwide.  Deploying such a large number of virtual machine images to such a large number of machines (400+) is chaotic to begin with and than you add to that a crew that is constantly on the road and you get an interesting mix.  The HOL team blog speaks for itself.

By popular annual demand I’m unveiling the one-of-a-kind TechEd 2009 bag.  This year’s version is a messenger bag with olive green, gray & black.  I think this year just might be my favorite…..hope everyone else agrees.

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!

It’s official, as of yesterday afternoon the TechEd North America 2009 sessions have released to the web and speaker notifications have gone out.  https://www.msteched.com/sessionlist/default.aspx 

Currently (12:50 PM on Thursday) there are 282 sessions that have been released with another 138 sessions and 200 labs releasing over the following weeks. We will also be releasing speaker names and session abstracts as they are locked down.

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:-)