TechEd day 2 wrapup

First thing yesterday, John and I met for breakfast at Cafe 222, where I had some excellent pancakes. The food at the San Diego convention center is pretty good, but it’s always nice to take a break from the HUGE CROWDS of people for which TechEd is justly famous, so we did.
I did a session and a half in the “Meet the Technologist” area yesterday, where I continued to be impressed with the level of questions we got. Lots of high-end, thoughtful technical questions, with very few of the howlers or RTFMs common in years past. The cabana idea has worked well, except when Navy SH-60s fly past outside.
Yesterday was my first spin through the exhibit hall. I got to meet with some folks from Quest/Aelita; they have an impressive line of management products that oddly doesn’t seem to be well known. The Authentica folks have an interesting product that can do digital rights management protection at the email gateway and via a web service– very cool stuff. I’ll write more about that when I have time to dig into it more.
Interestingly, the two overwhelming giveaway items this year were Xboxes and iPods. Some group of companies was giving away a MINI Cooper, which is kind of neat (although not as cool as the Mercedes SLK that was given away at TechTarget’s Enterprise Messaging Decisions show 🙂
Also on the show floor, I finally met John Osborn, executive editor at O’Reilly. We had a great discussion about Offfice development and books (which we extended later at the O’Reilly author party once JohnP got there). I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to turn some of the cool content we did for the Fabrikam project into a book, or two, to help build up our Office dev branding.
In a few minutes, I’m heading back over to Cafe 222 for another stack of pancakes, then it’s time to present MSG381 and fly to Cincinnati to rendezvous with my family. In the meantime, let it be known that JohnP’s Word dev session yesterday is holding steady at an excellent 8.09/9.00 rating, which is going to be tough for me to beat. However, the folks I linked to last week are still ruling: Steve Riley’s sessions have three of the top 10 slots, including an incredible 8.81! Go Steve!