Exchange Connections wrap-up wrap-up

Over at the Summit 7 blog, I have a post detailing some of my higher-level thoughts from this year’s Exchange Connections conference. I also had a few less-structured things to throw out there, thus this post.

First, I was really thankful to be able to see and spend time with so many of my good friends from the Exchange tribe. With the untimely demise of our friend Andrew Ehrensing fresh in my mind, I really appreciated getting to see Tony, Paul, Nathan, Wes, Michael, Jaap, Michel, Amy, Jay, Joel, Sigi, Andrew, Bhargav, Greg, the two Jeffs, Chris, Dave, Megan– and that’s just who I can remember off the top of my head (sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone). One of the biggest benefits of Exchange Connections and MEC is the close engagement it fosters within our community.

Second, sometimes session attendance offers surprising insights. I had 3 sessions: one on Managed Availability, one on Office 365 migration, and one on Lync/Exchange feature integration. I expected the migration session to draw the biggest crowd, but my Managed Availability session was jam-packed, and the Lync session was well-attended too– despite the fact that the integration items I talked about are well-documented and fairly common. I got some good attendee questions, which I’ll be using as blog fodder. It was a bit surprising to see how few attendees had deployed SharePoint, although that may have been because the real SharePoint devotees were in other sessions. Few of the attendees in my session had already deployed Office 365, although again those who had were probably in other sessions.

All three went well, though I felt a little flat in the second half of the first session. Thankfully none of my sessions were in the first time slot of the day, nor were any on the last day. My experience with Vegas conferences has been that being first up or on the last day means that attendees will be {tired, hung over, broke} and not at their most receptive.

Speaking of Vegas conferences: the Aria is a great property and I hope that future Exchange Connections conferences return there. I never did get to try their vaunted red velvet pancakes (Tony, here’s a recipe if you want to try them at home) but the conference food itself was decent and the meals I had (at Javier’s and the Aria Cafe) were quite good.

With Exchange Connections out of the way, my next planned event is the MVP Summit in Redmond in November. The Exchange MVPs have a long list of things we want to vigorously discuss with the product team, so I am looking forward to getting everyone in the same room again and having it out!