Interact2009 Berlin

 

Well its great to be helping out in an area of TechEd that I know really well, and I know lots of experts in UC so it’s good to catch up with old friends from around Europe.

I’m also pleased to be helping out at Interact09 as this will be my third Interact event and my second this year.

The sessions are really up close and personal, the conversations are amazing and the swag is nice.

But the really great thing about Interact is the opportunity to influence the Product team directly.  The techy part of the team too.  The guys who actually write the stuff.

And I think that’s the main value in my opinion.

 

We invite people who are influencers in their own UC circles.  Bloggers, Tweeters, customers who look after UC installations – and people who work with UC, whether in Support or Sales will all have really good interactions with the UC product team.  And they listen to you, your concerns, your comments and your questions.  

And that feedback goes into the pot for the next version of the product.

And that’s why you need to attend.  Hopefully there’ll be Interact sessions at a place near you soon.  I’ll let you know if there are…

 

Technorati Tags: Teched Europe,Interact2009

Things you don’t notice at Tech.ed

I continue to be amazed at the behind the scenes logistics at TechEd Berlin and the massive amount of work involved in making this event run smoothly.

I know about the fact that we need to feed 7200 people and that we need someone to look after that – but its the other ‘stuff’ that has blown me away.

Crew Catering.  all the folks in black need to be fed.  There’s a separate restaurant for over 500 of the folks in black

Cleaning.  The toilets need to be cleaned, the rubbish bins need to be emptied and the floor needs to be vacuumed.  It’s a good idea to clean the toilets during the sessions, so that they are free in the breaks when needed.  This cleaning army is all scheduled by Theresa

All the crew have walky talkies.  There are over 330 Motorolas at the venue which all need to be charged.  Everyone with a motorola needs a little directory printing so you can contact the correct person.  We have 2 guys on site looking after that at all times. 

The team of bag stuffers.  A small team of people who have put all of the free things into your delegate bags.  You all have the same items in each bag.  These items need to be delivered / printed / couriered to the area behind the registration desk before the event starts so that all of the bags are ready in time.  The empty crates / boxes packing need to be cleaned out.

Security.  The teams of people checking your badges as you go through are all briefed by the team so they know who to let where.  All of these need to be scheduled so they all get chance to have a break, get lunch etc etc. 

Registration.  The team of staff processing registration need to be briefed on procedure, which items to check, need training on how to process a registration – and what to do if there’s an anomaly.  And they all need to have coffee breaks too which needs to be scheduled.

The Learning Centre.  The whole hall needs to be managed, the TLC experts need to be scheduled so that the correct folks are at the booth at one time and there are no gaps.  The folks from the product team need to be scheduled outside of their session times.  This all needs to be coordinated.

The Exhibition hall.  All of the exhibitors need to arrive before the event, set up their stand – the correct stand which has been ordered/ designed or delivered according to the plan.  All of the goods have to be couriered, the electricity points must be in the correct location to match up with the stand design which has been agreed as per plan for weeks. An amazing task

The Community area.  All of the competitions need to be coordinated, the gifts purchased and delivered to the correct part of this massive venue by the correct day to be delivered to the correct hall.  The signs need to be placed in the correct place, to match the conference guide map, and the directions should also point to the correct place.

I could go on and on and on about this – there would be so much to talk about – but having seen Teched as a delegate, a Microsoft speaker, and now a member of the Teched team, its fascinating to find out that the things I’ve taken for granted about the event have been carefully planned, discussed, documented and choreographed for months before the event to make it as good as we can possibly make it.

And for 6 days only.

Wow…

Technorati Tags: Teched Europe

Behind the scenes at the Tech.Ed keynote

I’s fascinating to be part of the Tech.Ed keynote and walk-in show production and watch just how many different things have to be coordinated.  In addition to the stage and set design, lighting, video placement and view orientation (where to put the seats so that everyone can see the stage) there are many many strands that have to come together.

All of the speakers, demo people, assistants, script writers, coordinators and production team need to be backstage.  That means backstage passes.   Which means the registration codes need to be changed so we can track how many people will be backstage.

The passes need to be designed, and security need to be briefed so that they let the correct people with the correct passes backstage.  The videos, sounds, and back up hardware and process needs to be installed, loaded tested. What if one bulb bursts in the projector for example.  How many seconds delay is acceptable?  Where do we place the lights? The podium? The screens? The repeater screens?  Who makes the final decision?

The timings need to be tight.  Really tight.  The walk in session needs to finish bang on at 15:29:30, ready for the keynote announcement to roll.  The keynote must finish bang on time, ready for everyone to get to the Berlin wall celebrations.  Each part of the script needs to be tested.  This section will run for 180 seconds, roll video.  video for 240 seconds, cue voice over, cut to main speaker etc etc.  I now know what it must be like for TV acting.  This is so tightly choreographed, rehearsed, practiced, consulted, re-written, feedback, discussed.  All for a 90 minute presentation.

It’s amazing.  And I’m involved in decisions that I’ve never taken before.  Will there be clapping?  thigh slapping? choreographed audience participation? Shouting? Singing? (please no!)  how about a quiz?  Shall we get some audience members on stage? What swag or giveaways shall we have.

All of this is carefully planned, thought out and structured so that everything runs totally smoothly from 3pm November 9th.

Which isn’t very far away now.

And I’m not in Berlin yet – time is running short now and we haven’t all come together for rehearsals.  So far all of this has been done electronically.  By email and phone calls.  And it’s all coming together perfectly. And it’s amazing.

I’ll blog more over the weekend from Berlin with some pictures of the rehearsals and the build of the Tech.Ed event so you can see how something as huge as this is built in a couple of days.

Off to Berlin!…

Xbox shopping for Tech.Ed Berlin

31 Xboxes

3 Rock Bands

5 Guitars

6 Guitar Stands

6 Microphones

100 of these cool connectors

All getting ready to load onto the truck to set off and drive to Berlin on Friday (tomorrow).  So don’t try to buy an Xbox in West London this weekend  – we’ve cleared out all the shops

It’s noisy crazy here at Fitch today as the buzz builds.  This is the last day that the whole team are here – they start to fly over to Berlin on Sunday to get the event ready for the event.  So it’s a happy energised, excited time.  And I can’t wait!  

Technorati Tags: Teched Berlin

Time for an Anytime Upgrade?

I bought a PC with the wrong version on Vista on it earlier this year.  My mind was on other things – like setting up Amastra and thinking about the the OS version wasn’t exactly top of my mind.  I needed to upgrade it one day, but I didn’t  quite have the time. Tax and Company Law took priority over techy stuff

So I’ve been reminded about Windows Anytime Upgrade.  (Search for it in the Start search dialog box and you get this screen)

  Click on the link, put your new product key in, reboot, and there you are with the OS you really wanted in the first place.  now I can buy that storming Ferrari Netbook I’ve had my eye on for a while – and get the right OS on it too

It works for Windows 7 also by the way

 

Technorati Tags: Upgrade Windows,Windows Anytime upgrade

Create your learning roadmap at Tech.Ed Europe

We’ve decided to do something different at Teched Berlin this year and give attendees who have never been to any teched before the opportunity to maximise their time there.

We’re running sessions which we’ve named “Teched 101” which are sessions designed to navigate your way around teched if you’ve never been there before.  We’re running these sessions on Sunday afternoon and also on Monday.

Additionally, for attendees who want to know the path through to all of the sessions, we’re creating a learning roadmap for you to download.  It’s going to be available on the schedule builder, and I’ll be uploading track roadmaps as we finalise them, so if they’re not there now, then they will be there soon.  Here’s an example of a learning roadmap for a session in the Mobility track.  If you attend the session in bold, then it’s recommended that you attend the other sessions on the list.

MOB01-DEMO	What’s New for Developers in Windows Mobile 6.5
MOB301	Create a New Experience with Widgets for Windows Mobile
MOB303	Adding Life and Intelligence to Windows Mobile 6.5 Applications
MOB401	Game-Changing Memory and Performance Improvements with Windows Mobile 6.5 and the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
MOB05-IS	Come Meet the Windows Mobile Team!
MOB305	Making the Most of Windows Mobile 6.5 Gesture Support in Managed and Native Code

 

And the great thing is, you’ll be able to access your learning roadmap before the event, so you can hit the ground running with all of the sessions you want to attend – before you leave the UK.

Well – you will if I get my act together and put them all into the session grid.    Back to work…

Technorati Tags: teched Europe

Teched Content process – the Matrix

Now that the content has been locked, finalised and the copy is winging it’s way over to the printers for the conference guide, I thought I’d share with you the teched Europe content process from my perspective.

At the end of June we issued the call for content across Microsoft, to the product teams, people who have presented before, MCT’s and MVP’s we had a deadline for this content to be submitted by the end of July.

We appointed track owners to look after each physical track, gave the tracks codes (UNC, DAT, DEV etc) and connected the track owners with the track advisors at corp.  Track advisors are on hand to connect directly with the product teams and help the local European track owners with resources etc.

In early August, James and I started to hold track reviews with each track owner – 50% of the content was in the event tool (which runs on SharePoint by the way).  We talked about topics with the track owners, and how these should be categorised in the tool.  If you’re interested in Virtualisation for example, some of these sessions, are in the SVR track, some of them in MGT track and some in Green IT. So if you search, you’ll find them all.

Mid September was the close date for sessions, we reached the 100% content deadline.  over 1200 content pieces submitted for 300 breakout sessions and more than 100 interactive sessions.  We asked the track owners to create a list of waitlisted sessions that we would squeeze in if we could.

All of the speakers received their notifications for their sessions and James and I moved sessions round to accommodate speakers who were not planning to be there for the whole week, so couldn’t present on Friday or Monday for example.  James created a master grid and then the fun started.

Here’s the master grid so you can get an idea of what we’ve been working on for the last few weeks…

The top area indicates the 15 breakout rooms, the bottom area indicates the 6 Interactive rooms.  Each track has a different colour.  So with each of the large tracks having at least 20 sessions, you can see that the server track (purple) there is one session slot which contains at least 1 purple session.  So far so good.

We placed the overview, level 200 slots at the start of the week, and the level 400 slots towards the end.  We made sure that a speaker wasn’t speaking in a breakout room at the same time as an interactive session and made sure that the speaker didn’t do 2 sessions back to back (unless he requested it)

We then made sure that there was a good mix of Developer and IT Pro content in each session slot and that if there were 2 sessions from the same track in the same timeslot, then the topics were different (Exchange and OCS for example).  we then checked across all of the abstracts in each timeslot to make sure that there weren’t any similar sessions across different tracks.

We moved sessions around to make sure that the learning followed a path and that the sessions made sense to follow each other.  So far so good eh?

Then on Friday, everything locked, no more changes as we had to put each session into a room. This is the tricky part.

We have 1 room for 1000 people and 2 rooms for 200.  The trick here is to get the most popular session into the largest room and work down from there.  and that’s where you come in.  Teched attendees fill in a survey and vote for their sessions.  We take the most popular session and put it in the largest room.  But there’s an issue.

There are some sessions that we have not published externally – the product teams don’t want us to (product announcements etc) So you can’t vote on these.  So we’ve got to make an educated guess on how popular these are going to be.

There are also some sets of sessions that MUST go in the same room (hardware for the demos).  but some of these sessions are much more popular than others.  These need to go in the same room, in the correct order, taking into account learning paths etc.

So getting these into one grid, making sure that we have no speaker clashes, no room clashes, no topic clashes, 1 session per room, no speaker overload and the right sessions in the right rooms, and interactive rooms all colour coded with the right track has been a HECK of a job.  James and I worked all weekend to make sure it was right. And boy, I do hope it IS right

So, as long as we don’t get 900 folks attending a session that only had 20 votes over the last 60 days, we think we’ll be fine.  Hopefully. Fingers crossed.  Everything crossed

So now you know what I’ve been doing for the last 3 weeks.  Interesting stuff eh?

Now onto the next task at teched – accommodating all of the internal meeting requests, adding some repeat sessions where we think the sessions are going to be very, very popular, and creating the learning plan. 

But that’s a job for tomorrow.   My brain is totally full and in stack overload after doing this all weekend.  Today, now this is all finished I’m going to lie down in a darkened room with a VERY large glass of wine.  Phew!

Free Exchange 2010 Training

I missed this, but Andrew pointed me towards the Microsoft Learning Clinic offering Exchange 2010 free online learning.  There’s 2 hours of learning in the collection…

Very useful if you want to get your head around all of the extra new features in Exchange 2010.  from what I’ve seen so far, Exchange 2010 OWA is significantly better than any OWA I’ve ever seen and I’ll spend a bit of time playing with it before reporting back here.

Meanwhile – take advantage of this free offer whilst its on…

Office Communications Server – from the Outside

Well after evangelising about OCS from inside of corpnet – I’ve had my first experience of using OCS from the outside.  My teched Europe  client work means that I need to sit on a lot of OCS calls, and today was no exception.  So I clicked onto the URL in the appointment asking me to join the call from a web browser

This invokes the normal Communicator Web Access window – but this time I selected the bottom option as I no longer have a Microsoft user account

Which gave me the normal dialog box about signing in

Now this is where things get really cool.  I get the dialog box asking me to join the call.  I click the “Join conference call” and get the dialog to put my phone number in…

I entered my home phone number – and it rang to connect me to the call.  Very very impressive.

There are a couple of issues with meetings created from the US compared with meetings created in the UK, but that’s an internal MS issue which needs to be sorted out.  But for me, in my first day on the outside of corpnet, was a really nice experience!

Once an evangelist always an evangelist eh

Technorati Tags: OCS,communicator,VOIP

Tech.ed Europe Register first, Save the most

oops.  I completely forgot to include this blog post when the site went live on Monday.  Basically we’re selling tickets for teched like the airlines do.  The first seats (places) sold are the cheapest and they go up – like airline seats do, the more places that are sold.  So it’s up to you to convince your budget owners that you need to register EARLY!

 

The very very cheapest places have gone already but you’ll still get a really great deal if you register your place soon. Perhaps we should do some badges with “I got my ticket at “xxx” because I booked early for Tech.ed”

Let me know how cheap you get your ticket …

 

Technorati Tags: teched europe