Wow, it’s been nearly a month since my last post here. In general I am not a believer in posting stuff on a regular schedule, preferring instead to wait until I have something to say. All of my “saying” lately has been on behalf of my employer though. I have barely even had time to fly. For another time: a detailed discussion of the ins and outs of shopping for an airplane. For now, though, I am making my final preparations to attend this year’s Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in Austin! My suitcase is packed, all my devices are charged, my slides are done, and I am prepared to overindulge in knowledge sharing, BBQ eating, and socializing.
It is interesting to see the difference in flavor between Microsoft’s major enterprise-focused conferences. This year was my first trip to Lync Conference, which I would summarize as being a pretty even split between deeply technical sessions and marketing focused around the business and customer value of “universal communications”. In reviewing the session attendance and rating numbers, it was no surprise that the most-attended sessions and the highest-rated sessions tended to be 400-level technical sessions such as Brian Ricks’ excellent deep-dive on Lync client sign-in behavior. While I’ve never been to a SharePoint Conference, from what my fellow MVPs say about it, there was a great deal of effort expended by Microsoft on highlighting the social features of the SharePoint ecosystem, with a heavy focus on customization and somewhat less attention directed at SharePoint Online and Office 365. (Oh, and YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER YAMMER.) Judging from reactions in social media, this focus was well-received but inevitably less technical given the newness of the technology.
That brings us to the 2014 edition of MEC. The event planners have done something unique by loading the schedule with “Unplugged” panel discussions, moderated by MVP and MCM/MCSM experts and consisting of Microsoft and industry experts in particular technologies. These panels provide an unparalleled opportunity to get, and give, very candid feedback around individual parts of Exchange and I plan on attending as many of them as I can. This is in no way meant to slight the many other excellent sessions and speakers that will be there. I’d planned to summarize specific sessions that I thought might be noteworthy, but Tony published an excellent post this morning that far outdoes what I had in mind, breaking down sessions by topic area and projected attendance. Give it a read.
I’m doing two sessions on Monday: Exchange Unified Messaging Deep Dive at 245p and Exchange ActiveSync: Management Challenges and Best Practices at 1145a. The latter is a vendor session with the folks from BoxTone, during which attendees both get lunch (yay) and the opportunity to see BoxTone’s products in action. They’re also doing a really interesting EAS health check, during which you provide CAS logs and they run them through a static analysis tool that, I can almost guarantee, will tell you things you didn’t know about your EAS environment. Drop by and say hello!
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