No, you can’t do it from command line. You have to use the GUI available at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/ to register for PDC 2008. I know, we’re working on it!
To be or not to be
If you’re sort of the developer looking out of for the next gen. stuff and an early adopter of technologies, PDC is the right place to be. On the other hand, if you’d prefer technologies that have only been released and out in the market, maybe TechEd is right place for you. FYI, there is a TechEd happening next week, so watch out for lots of pure refined content.
$2195 USD, yeah right
Undoubtedly many will feel that it is slightly higher. But consider this, Microsoft is not making even a single cent of profit out of this. In fact, we’re losing some which is compensated by the event sponsors. I’m volunteering for one of the event activities for PDC and I’m told that my budget is near to $0. It takes a lot to run a conference for 4 days and host around 8,000 geeks. So $2195 (includes $200 early bird discount) should be totally worth it. If you’re an early adopter anyways, why wait and pay an extra 200 bucks.
Personally, if I were to attend only one conference a year (or couple of years!), that would undoubtedly be PDC. Being a developer wouldn’t you want to goto the coolest conference and jell with all the other geeks!
What can one expect
Lots of good things around the Cloud. Many new “stuff” will be there. Of course, CRM will definitely be there. So I hope to see you there.
BTW, many bloggers have posted the “Brain in a can” picture for PDC. I kind of find that disturbing. Do you?
Of course it would be unfair if you don’t take credit for the work you do.
For ISVs (in the US only), improvements have been made to the indirect customer registration process in VOICE. For more information on this announcement and instructions on how to register your indirect customers, check out this article.
Indirect Customer registration process changing for US, Canada and LATAM ISVs beginning May 18th, 2008
Obviously there are quite a few benefits in keeping your list of customers up-to-date. If you’ve been to Convergence this year, you might have noticed several people wearing batches indicating that they’re members of the “President’s Club”. Wonder what it takes for you to wear one, check out the below excerpt from the article.
ISVs can achieve FY07 President’s Club by adding 53 total new customers in FY08 (combined total of direct and indirect customer adds).
BTW, I should remind myself of the first statement in this blog post!
We have released a whitepaper on the Platform Goodness of Microsoft CRM 4.0 and how Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can leverage the platform to build all sorts of applications/mashups on top of the platform.
The whitepaper is available for download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1217efff-be8f-4ac8-8e32-af367305fba9&DisplayLang=en
David Yack from Colorado Technology Consultants helped us with authoring this paper and please give a big shout out to him.
Notice that we highlight the xRM capabilities of the platform in this paper and it also drills down into different scenarios where you can use and integrate with the platform.
Though the paper covers a lot of ground, it is a great start to think about various possibilities you may have overseen all along. So I strongly recommend reading this not only for the breadth of developers and technical decision makers out there but also for seasoned MSCRM implementers.