Canada IS Ready

After nearly two months traveling across Canada meeting over 13,500 IT Professionals, developers, technical and business decision makers, the Canadian launch tour has come to an end and we have our sights set on the consumer launch scheduled for January 30th.  It was an exciting time but I have to admit I am glad to be home for a while.

There are a lot of highlights from the tour, some we have blogged about and some we will never mention again :)  I think the award for the most dedicated audience has to go to Regina, who despite a Winter Storm Watch and striking snow plow drivers still turned out in larger than expected numbers.  Edmonton was a close second with a major snowfall starting at about 7:30 am on the day of the event. 

With the events over, the post event resources become available and there are a lot of them.  The CanITPro blog has a section dedicated to Launch 2007 with all the postings we made.  One you surely want to check out is the Links posting that has all the links we showed at the end of each session.  Another post that may interest you is the hardware post.  I wrote one here with some hardware specs and Rick wrote this one with photo of all the stuff we had to carry!  The video streams we recorded are being published and they should all be online shortly, including the Developer and Architect tracks.  With all three tracks it took some careful decision making to make sure you hit the sessions you wanted to see, but now you can watch the sessions you missed!  You can see those, as well as find other great resources at the post event resource page.

One thing I found on the resource page that was cool, is the Toronto Highlight video that our former rockstar intern, Mark Zielinski, produced is here.  You are all familiar with his work as he is the one responsible for the blogs hot look!  A few other links you should check out.....

Technet Canada Eval Center - Download evals of all the latest software

Technet Canada Beta Central - Download betas of some upcoming software (keep an eye open for Longhorn betas)

TechNet Canada Flash - Bi-weekly newsletter to keep up to date on what's coming next!

And of course, keep coming back to the Canadian IT Professionals blog to find out what we are doing, but more importantly, keep in contact with us.  This is this cool little link at the top of the page, under the logo, that says Email.  If you click on that, you can send us an email and you WILL get a response!  We want to hear from you, what you are doing, what problems you are having, and what successes you have had.  Share your launch story, share your experiences, share your knowledge.

With that said I would like to thank everyone who took part and congratulate you.  I am proud to say Canada IS Ready!