Trip Report on TechStravaganza Atlanta 2011!!!

TechStravaganza Atlanta 2011

For those of you that didn’t make it to the TechStravaganza at the Microsoft office last Friday you missed a great day!!!

We had 115 people turn up to see Mark Minasi give presentations on the Cloud and IPv6 as well as pick from 12 sessions in a 3-track program. 

There were a few minor glitches, like delays in the breakfast arriving, which was very important as everyone knows how hard it is to sit through a 60 min session without any caffeine!!!  

Thankfully our Facilities Coordinator at Microsoft, Tarra, came to the rescue and rectified the food and snacks issue and made sure we had breakfast and lunch delivered.  To accommodate the delay of breakfast we made a 15 min adjustment to the late morning sessions.

Thanks for the quick turnaround from the caterers!!!  You can see the lunch they put together for us at short notice and below is a picture of them right after they finished delivering it!!

What was the Best Attended Track?

Without a doubt, PowerShell!  The interest in PowerShell has grown tremendously over the last few years, and this track confirmed that.  The track kicked off with a session from Aaron Nelson called PowerShell Dirty Dozen.  This was followed by two “PowerShell Best Practices” sessions by Ed Wilson, one of the Microsoft Scripting Guys and a well-known scripting expert. Ed is a Microsoft-certified trainer who has delivered a popular Windows PowerShell workshop to Microsoft Premier Customers worldwide. He has written 8 books including various books on Windows scripting, Windows PowerShell Scripting Guide, and Microsoft Windows PowerShell Step by Step all published by Microsoft Press.  The room was packed to overflowing.  Last session was with Joel Bennett talking about building graphical interfaces in PowerShell.

What was in the Other Tracks?

The other tracks had a variety of topics, including Cloud Computing, delivered by my colleague Yung Chou.  We also had sessions on Forefront Identity Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Windows Performance Analysis, Windows Authentication, Windows Internals: Memory Management, and System Center Configuration Manager 2012. 

Quite a breadth of topics!!  If there’s nothing there you think you might be interested in then you’re probably not working in the IT space!! 

Conclusion

During the course of the day there were a boatload of giveways raffled off including two Xbox 360 Kinects!!!   All in all it was quite a day. 

I’d like to thank the four user groups for putting together the 2nd annual TechStravaganza - Atlanta Active Directory User Group, Atlanta SBS User Group, Atlanta SMS User Group and Atlanta PowerShell User Group.

I’d also like to thank our keynote speaker Mark Minasi and the rest of the speaker team (in alphabetical order): Joel Bennett, Greg Cameron, Yung Chou, Don McCall, Aaron Nelson, Jeff Stokes and last but not least, Ed “Mr. Scripting” Wilson.

Of course a big thank you to the sponsors: Veeam, Symantec and Microsoft, as this event wouldn’t have been possible without their generous sponsorship.

Finally to all who attended - THANKYOU for supporting the user group efforts!!! And if you didn’t attend… WHY NOT?

Look forward to seeing everyone at TechStravaganza 2012!!