Final City Report - TNX: TechNet Exchange (YUL - Montreal)

I can't get away from posting the final report on the last city on the TechNet Exchange tour. Montreal. It was last Thursday with over 300 attendees who came to eagerly see the tour and experience the power of collaboration with Sharepoint, Live Communication Server and Exchange on the mobile platform of any device anywhere.
Montreal has traditionally been one of the more vocal cities on the tour - let's just say they are passionate about a lot of things and like to keep it interactive. You didn't let us down. The final Q&A session lasted right to the very end for those who wanted to stay.

I wanted to thank Jean-Francois Richard (president of the Quebec IT Pro user group) who drove down from Quebec and just happened to pick up a iMate kJAM GSM based device from a retailer around the corner in time for us to show it off to the crowd. He later told me in an email that he had to return the demo device and pick up his actual order the following day. When he did - the retailer mentioned that the demo device was sold the same day it was returned - apparently snapped up by a TechNet Exchange attendee!  As a funny aside - there wasn't time to reformat/hard reset the device, so someone out there has ME as a background picture on their Today Screen!!! (Too Funny!)

What I can definitely say looking back at all the cities and after reviewing almost all of the comments / feedback - you were all very interested in the content and we didn't let you down. You were also pleasantly surprised at the level of technical content vs. marketing content. Yeah - we still had to have marketing information in there, but I think we managed to get a nice balance of practical IT Pro details in there as well. In all honesty - it was the first time I had had the chance to put meat to the collaboration story and get the whole picture out to you in one stop.

As you probably read in the post event email (if you attended) we will be making the Audio stream available in downloadable/podcast form in the very near future. A little later on, the AV guys from Toronto will give us the full media stream and we will in turn make it available as a downloadable format for all those IT Pros in cities we weren't able to visit.  Lastly - those demos… We will be recording a "democast" of each of the demos and will make them available in smaller AV chunks. Where do you hear about them? Stay tuned to this BLOG to find out!

The analysis is underway to understand how we can do better the next time around. I just got off the phone with Bruce Cowper talking about the Build'06 tour. He's the Prime content lead and I will be assisting him by refining the content/demos as well as going on the road presenting with him in March. Register today for a city close to you! (https://www.microsoft.com/canada/technet/build06/default.aspx)