TechEd Update 1

Dear reader,

Forgive the fact that I haven't updated since Sunday.  There's a lot of oysters, beer and TechEd goodness going on and I've been a little busy.

We met up with the Krewe at the New Orleans Oyster Festival on Saturday and had the best chargrilled oysters from Oceana and Peacemaker Po'boys from Acme Oyster Co.  Eating that delicious food in 100 degree heat and matching humidity makes a man thirsty, so mass quantities of beer and hurricanes were in order.  Later in the evening, more oysters met their fate on the chargrill at Acme off Bourbon Street.

Monday came around too quickly and the TechEd festivities began.  I was scheduled co-present a session with Ran Morimoto at 4:30pm on "Exchange 2003/2007 Migration to Exchange 2010: Tips, Tricks and Lessons Learned".  I began gathering up my laptop and materials that I'd need for the demo when panic struck.  I forgot to pack the HDMI to VGA cable required to show the demos I've been preparing for a month and a half.  None of the rooms are set up to use HDMI video and I certainly couldn't hold a laptop up for everyone to see.

One of the FANTASTIC events staff worked up a solution where they would add a second network drop at the podium so I could RDP into the laptop from the presentation computer.  Perfect!  I was good to go.

The session went well - very full audience of maybe 150 people.  I had a bit of trouble with a couple of demos, one due to the lousy Internet connectivity here in the convention center and the other due to caching.  Arrggh!  I've worked so hard on these demos I wanted them to be perfect.  Oh well, it was a GREAT experience.

Regardless, our session is so far rated in the top 10 sessions for all sessions and was the #1 unified communications session for the day.  Nice!

I held the Exchange Roundtable at The Rusty Nail near the convention center Monday night.  The bar was, well, "colorful" with lots of local flavor.  I'm glad none of us got mugged on the way there.  It was attended by about 25 people including Exchange product team notables, such as Ross Smith IV, Scott Schnoll, and Kumar Venkateswar.  It was great to have some time to discuss Exchange issues and have some "how it works" discussions.  Thanks to everyone who attended!  I hope to do this again next year.

This morning I was invited to join Paul Robichaux for breakfast at Cafe Beignet with other Exchange notables.  Great beignets and cafe au lait, not to mention the conversations!  Thanks, Paul.

The rest of the day was full of regular attendee sessions and talking with people.  Tonight is the MVP IT Influencers party at the Aquarium of the Americas and the ClusterFunk party.  should be another evening to remember (if I can).