Tech.End – Day 4

It’s all over. After 4 days with 2520 attendees, everyone from Microsoft and Jack Morton needs a big hug and a million thanks. TechEd is the only technology event I’ve been to, but it has set the standards pretty high. I went in thinking TechEd Australia was going to be the forgotten child of the big TechEd family, but it turned out to be a rather special.

Having no major announcements or any product launches with most of the technology showcased already been on the market for quite some time, nothing really “wow”ed me, but didn’t suck either.

The most interesting part of TechEd for me was Student Day. Not because I got the opportunity to present something to an audience, but because when you try to compact all of Microsoft into a 6 hour event, you end up with the very best.

I think TechEd could be better with the following improvements:

  • Kinder security guards
  • More varieties of food (or rotational daily menus)
  • Bigger venue for closing party
  • Closer distance between expo and session rooms
  • More product showcases
  • More freebies
  • More chairs

After the expo closed at 3:15pm on Friday, it felt like evacuating a war-zone.
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Suddenly, everything was gone and ready to be shipped off.

Here’s a bunch of very cool people who I enjoyed TechEd with, in a very particular order: Frank Arrigo, Bernard Oh, Scott Savage, Alex Shamis, Ken Soedjatmiko, Sarah Hatton, Jeza Ann Mancenido, Marty Gnanananthan, David Burela, Susan Grant, Jeff Alexander, Hugo Ortega, Neil Roodyn, Paul Woods, Chris Boulton, and everyone else who thinks they should be here.

Maybe (*cough* *wink* *nudge*) I’ll see everyone there at the post-Vista and post-Office07 TechEd Australia 2007 on the Gold Coast.

9 insightful thoughts

  1. *ahem* Point taken, Long 🙂

    I’m glad you had a great experience at Tech.Ed and Student Day! It was good to bring in talented and motivated students like yourself on the stage.

    Hopefully, this is a start to greater heights and engagements with Microsoft. Well done, my new friend 🙂

  2. TechEd Australia was really fun and and better for having you there Long!;-)

    See you in Queensland – oh, and make sure you tag along to some other Tech Conferences as it’s a very addictive scene. Catch ya!

  3. While all you microsoft people where at your closing party having fun I was sitting in my office trouble shooting IIS / WinNT Server problems till late in the evening…

    Thanks Microsoft for making such wonderful products.

    I great to see how Microsoft puts all that money us custerms pay them to such good use…

  4. No one forces you to use Microsoft products. If you think there is anything better that you want to use, why not use it then?

    But if you are using Microsoft products, then stop complaining. Get some support if you require assistance.

  5. Thanks for the shout out Long! It was good to meet you, hopefully I will be up on the Gold Coast next year too! TechEd is always great fun, I am sure that the Gold Coast will be awesome too. Their convention centre has a better layout for TechEd too, so it should solve most of your problems (except the chairs thing, last year they literally had none, even in the eating areas).

  6. ahmmm… Long Zheng you obviously have very little real world IT experience. What you would like to use and what you “have to use” are two very different things. Most of my clients for some reason or another have bought into the Windows Server platform. Like it or not I have to support those if I want to make a living in this industry.

    Get support? Well smarty pants, when a server goes down on a Friday at 6pm the only Microsoft support you seem to be able to get are those friendly but mostly incompetent Indian help bots M$ seems to deploy these days. So, yes I did try to get support but the support I got was pretty useless.

    Usually I wouldn’t get upset about these things but when a server suddenly “falls over” for no apparent reason and the only real solution the support people have it to re-install the server (on Friday night mind you) I generally lose my sense of humor.

  7. Not that this is really related to your problem, but when my blog’s Linux server topples over at 5am in the morning when I’m peaking at 5,000 visitors an hour, no one helps me either. Hell I have even less experience managing a Linux server. I generally press restart and pray for it to all work.

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