TechEd Day 3

Today everyone is tired.  Sessions, HOL, exhibit floor, BOF, side meetings, parties, and walking 10-15 miles a day, sitting in metal folding chairs all take their toll.

Yes, most aren’t getting that much sleep, it is a string of very long days.

For example, the HOL (Hands on labs) was open 14 hours yesterday.  I didn’t even make it by there.  There are so many people to re-connect with, so many new people to meet.

I saw that some 9000 tweets in the first two days used the hast tag #msteched, amazing.

My Daughter graduated college last week, she had the sense that she is Done learning for now.  In IT we are always learning because technology is always moving new things to learn all the time.

Being internal at Microsoft, we have access to stuff (new things) before a public event like this. I usually think I am fairly good at keeping current on our technology.  After two days of TechEd this year I feel very far behind.  A session yesterday on System Center Orchestrator, all the details of System Center 2012, and today Sever App-V (a new part of SCVMM) are so much to learn.

I have been focusing on Private Cloud, Virtualization, and Azure tracks, basically everything cloud.  I haven’t even touched Office 365.  I am just breathless.  So much to learn, so much new stuff to take in.

This year’s TechEd has had a new tone.  One of the sessions yesterday on Hyper-v verse VMware was great.  It talked a lot about how to manage VMware from System Center VMM 2012, we would have never done a session like that 2 years ago.

I am not sure how to describe the feeling of the vibe of this event.  People are excited, engaged, hungry to connect and learn. Maybe it’s nice to have a large group again, the last couple of years with low attendance due to the recession was disappointing.   It is amazing the number of people I have met that this is their first TechEd.  Where have you been? I met one MVP from the bay area last night at the community party, he has been MVP for 9 years but this is his first TechEd, wow!