Microsoft's annual TechEd conference was held this year in Sydney, and Jeremy and myself from Shine were able to attend. As far as nerd-fests go, this is about as big as they get in Australia. And there were some big nerds here too - let me tell you that!
The conference itself was held over 3-4 days at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre, which is not what you'd call a terrible venue to have to turn up at every morning!
As part of the registration, everyone received a TechEd-branded Targus laptop bag. And they were everywhere. It's actually a really good bag, and would be quite expensive to buy new, so I'm guilty of now using it as my main laptop bag back home!!!
The conference itself was very, very good - much better than I was expecting. You are exposed to such a wide range of technology over the course of the 3 days, and it's great to be able to see the systems actually working. Most of the sessions I attended were showing how certain platforms are being used inside Microsoft itself, and the majority of the demos were conducted using the main Microsoft servers that were running the rest of the organisation. For instance, in a Unified Communications demo, the presenter was logged into the regional communications server in Singapore, and had joined a web conference running on a server in Redmond, with participants in both Aus and the US. To see things such as this running in real-life scenarios, warts and all, really hammers home the fact that you could implement this gear in your own firm right now, and get similar results.
As you might expect, Jeremy and I came back with a much clearer picture about a lot of technology, and how it could be incorporated into our business here to give an instant boost in both capability and productivity. Now all we need to do is try to find some money to let us implement the things we'd like! I dare say we won't be the only ones in such a situation though!
I can't wait to go next year. It really was a very worthwhile time, and most enjoyable too boot (despite the "party", which we shall never speak of again. Pinball machines and Xboxes, but no live music or anything enjoyable - do they HAVE to try so hard to live up to their stereotypes???).
