The MEC 2014 conference team sent out a statistical summary of the conference to speakers, and it makes for fascinating reading. I wanted to share a few of the highlights of the report because I think it makes some really interesting points about the state of the Exchange market and community.
First: the 101 sessions were attended by a total of 13,079 people. The average attendance across all sessions was 129, which is impressive (though skewed a bit by the size of some of the mega-sessions; Microsoft had to make a bet that lots of people would attend these sessions, which they did!). In terms of attendance, the top 10 sessions were mostly focused on architecture and deployment:
- Exchange Server 2013 Architecture
- Ready, set, deploy: Exchange Server 2013
- Experts Unplugged: Exchange Top Issues – What are they and does anyone care or listen?
- Exchange Server 2013 Tips & Tricks
- The latest on High Availability & Site Resilience
- Exchange hybrid: architecture and deployment
- Experts Unplugged: Exchange Deployment
- Exchange Server 2013 Transport Architecture
- Exchange Server 2013 Virtualization Best Practices
- Exchange Design Concepts and Best Practices
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To put this in perspective, the top session on this list had just over 600 attendees and the bottom had just under 300. Overall attendance to sessions on the architecture track was about double that of the next contender, the deployment and migration track. That tells me that there is still a large audience for discussions of fundamental architecture topics, in addition to the day-in, day-out operational material that we’d normally see emerging as the mainstay of content at this point in the product lifecycle.Next takeaway: Tim McMichael is a rock star. He captured the #1 and #2 slots in the session ratings, which is no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard him speak. I am very hopeful that I’ll get to hear him speak at Exchange Connections this year. The overall quality of speakers was superb, in my biased opinion. I’d like to see my ratings improve (more demos!) but there’s no shame in being outranked by heavy hitters such as Tony, Michael, Jeff Mealiffe, Ross Smith IV (pictured at left; not actual size), or the ebullient Kamal Janardhan. MEC provides an excellent venue for the speakers to mingle with attendees, too, both at structured events like MAPI Hour and in unstructured post-session or hallway conversations. To me, that direct interaction is one of the most valuable parts of attending a conference, both as a speaker and because I can ask other speakers questions about their particular areas of expertise.
Third, the Unplugged sessions were very popular, as measured both by attendance numbers and session ratings. I loved both the format and content of the ones I attended, but they depend on having a good moderator— someone who is both knowledgeable about the topic at hand and experienced at steering a group of opinionated folks back on topic when needed. While I am naturally bad at that, the moderators overall did an excellent job and I hope to see more Unplugged sessions at future events. When attendees added sessions to their calendar, the event staff used that as a means of gauging interest and assigning rooms based on the likely number of attendees. However, looking at the data shows that people flocked to sessions based on word-of-mouth and didn’t necessarily update their calendars; I calculated the attendance split by dividing the number of people who attended an actual session by the number who said they would attend. If 100 calendared the session but 50 attended, that would be a 50% split. The average split across all sessions (except one) was 53.8%— not bad considering how dynamic the attendance was. The one session I left out was “Experts Unplugged: Architecture – HA and Storage”, which had a split of 1167%! Of the top 10 splits (i.e. sessions where the largest percentage of people stood by their original plans), 4 were Unplugged sessions. |
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So does that mean that total attendance for MEC was 13,079? If not, what was it (it seemed like a lot) and how did it compare to MEC 2012 attendance?
I don’t have firm attendance numbers, although it is certainly less than 13,079. I think there were probably around 2000 paid attendees; I don’t know where the 13K figure came from, though it might be “total number of butts in seats” for all sessions across all days.