A History of TechEd Europe in Conference Bags Part 2

Barring any last minute volcanoes I'll be at MMS 2011 next month, so I thought I'd have a look back over some past conferences I've been to. This is a continuation of the conference bag retrospective I started here.

TechEd: IT Forum 2007
13-16 November, Barcelona

SCCM 2007, Bitlocker and lots of security stuff made this a great conference. Well, that and the weather. And the food. And the architecture. And....




TechEd EMEA IT Professionals 2008
3-7 November, Barcelona

The last TechEd in Barcelona, and finally I get to the Camp Nou. A Champions League tie against FC Basel which ended 1-1. Messi scored for Barca, I can't remember who scored for Basel.

The talks from the conference are available online at msteched.com, here are some I'd recommend

Windows Security Boundaries by Mark Russinovich
Advanced Operating System Deployment Part 2 (Part 1 seems to be missing)




TechEd EMEA 2009
9-13 November, Berlin

The last European TechEd I attended was sadly the worst. I don't know what happened in the organisation of this event, but it was terrible in comparison to (at least) the five previous TechEds.

The scheduling was bad on two fronts. The first day of the conference was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. While it was great to be in Berlin for such a historic event it meant hotel rooms were hard to come by and expensive. The scheduling of the talks was poor too - similarly themed talks either clashed or were at different ends of the conference center. Popular talks were put in small rooms and there were a number of hastily arranged repeat talks.

The Messe conference center was nice, but they obviously didn't have enough room. Corridors were packed during transitional periods and some rooms didn't even have four walls. Some of the rooms had a curtain separating the auditorium from the corridor making it difficult to hear the speaker.

Bottled water was no longer available, instead provided by water coolers. Unfortunately there were no cups and they didn't have enough water bottles to supply with the conference bags.

Berlin as a city was great (I'd recommend the currywurst if you're visiting).

It's a pity the conference organisers had a nightmare.

A History of TechEd Europe in Conference Bags Part 1

I'm off to MMS 2011 next month so I thought it would be fun to look back over the Microsoft conferences I've attended in the past. I've dug out the old conference bags from on top of the wardrobe - excuse the dust!

TechEd Europe 2004
29 June - 2 July, Amsterdam

Held in the Amsterdam RAI, this was the first major conference I attended. Some of the key topics covered were the additional security features of XP SP2, Windows ACS (which ended up in SCOM) and running Server 2003 on 64-bit hardware.

Sadly, the conference bag was possibly the worst ever conference bag in the history of conference bags. A bright orange courier bag with a special hook to hold your drum(!). I'm assuming the orange was to help you remember you were in the Netherlands, and the drum... believe it or not, the drum was handed out as part of the keynote. It was fun coming back through customs with this.



TechEd Europe 2005
5 - 8 July, Amsterdam

Again held in the Amsterdam RAI, the big topics in 2005 (for me) were WSUS, LTI and ZTI with BDD and security.

Looking at the bag, it would appear that SQL Server 2005 was a big deal this year. The bag seems a bit conservative compared to 2004!



TechEd: IT Forum 2006
14-17 November, Barcelona

The IT Forum and TechEd events merged in 2006 and TechEd: IT Forum was born. The conference center in Barcelona was excellent, but not quite as good as the RAI in Amsterdam.

I went to a lot of talks about Vista. This was sadly a waste of time thanks to the pain that was/is Volume Licensing 2.0. The original Reduced Functionality Mode in Vista made it impossible for us deploy Vista - we weren't prepared to take the risk that someone's workstation may end up a glorified web browser. Security talks were high on my list again this year - they were not only useful, but helped with the CISSP CPE credits!