February, 2005

Juts had some feedback about last year’s sessions on Sharepoint at TechEd. The feedback was that last year’s sessions weren’t in-depth enough.

That type of feedback is always welcomed. I pass it on directly to the relevant track owners – in this case Eric Van Bever who owns the Portals and Collaboration track. Indeed, this year’s TechEd features a separate Portals track with all sessions on Sharepoint, Content Management Server and Live Communication Server.  

At this moment, we are at the 60% point. This means we are having titles for about 60% of the total session slots. The Sharepoint sessions selected thus far – and these are subject to change – are listed below.

We are definately adding sessions to tis list in the coming weeks so please let us know whether there are topics you would like to see covered that aren’t listed here. Thx!  

Call for papers site closes on the 11th of March. If you are intending to submit a post then please read my previous email on this.

Cheers,

Hans

So if you want to find out about Microsoft’s to be released tools for Software Development Lifecycle management then check out these dates and locations:

I only have the registration URL’s of a couple of places so for the rest I suggest contacting the local Microsoft Offices…

For Czech: https://www.microsoft.cz/akce/VSTSTour/

For Germany: http://msevents-eu.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=118756782&Culture=de-DE   

For Sweden: http://www.microsoft.com/sverige/msdn/live/2005/

How do I get to speak at TechEd Europe 2005? That’s a question I get all the time when I tell people I’m involved in the content selection for TechEd.

The way to do this is by submitting a session on the ‘call for papers’ site which you can find here:

https://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/3rdParty/

Now, if you are interested, I need to warn you just a little bit. I don’t want to scare you though.

1. Only few are selected. We get many more talks submitted than we can possibly accept.
2. The bar to enter is high. For speakers who have been speaking at previous TechEd’s, we’ll check those scores and for people who are new to speaking at TechEd, we usually ask for scores from other events at which that person spoke (in English) before.
3. TechEd is an event that people pay for to attend and therefore the audience is expecting the highest possible quality. So if you get to speak at TechEd, be prepared!

In the meantime also check out the official TechEd website: http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/05/pre/content/default.aspx

If you are interested in ASP.NET 2.0 check out whether the ASP.NET caravan is passing by a location near you: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/aspontour/default.aspx

Top speakers like Scott Guthrie, Brian Goldfarb, Dave Platt and Dave Webster are delivering a full day of ASP.NET 2.0 content all around Europe.

On the right hand site, the links lead you to the registration pages for each of the countries where the tour stops.

You can see some pictures here: http://blogs.aspitalia.com/rickyvr/.

(The guy sleeping is Fabio a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. Unbelievable:-))

Planning for TechEd Europe 2005 is well on its way. I should know because this year I’m the overall Technical Content owner for the event.

In 2001 I attended my first TechEd.  Starting from the year after I increased my level of participation. First as speaker then as content owner for the Developer tracks and now as overall content owner.

My job this year is to make sure we bring the content our customers want at TechEd Europe. The three audiences we see at TechEd are the architects, the developers and the ITPro’s. They each have their own areas of interest in which other topics or products are hot. ‘Hot’ for TechEd means that it is relevant today or in the near future (6 months).

In the developer space, I’m really excited that we are nearing Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0 and of Visual Studio 2005 (codename Whidbey). With this beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft will release a Go Live license removing any legal barrier to take an application live on the beta bits. This obviously makes Whidbey very relevant and developers will therefore see a big focus on Whidbey technologies.

Also database aficionados will be happy to hear that SQL Server 2005 will be the highlight of the show. Beta 3 will be out by then and we want to take the opportunity to get the SQL developers, administrators and data analysts ready start using this major release of SQL Server.

For Architects we see other trends developing. SOA’s or Connected systems, software factories, domain specific languages… About 40 sessions – that’s almost 2 per timeslot – will be featuring information immediately usable by architects designing those agile solutions that have many characteristics like security, scalability, manageability, interoperability etc…

Half of the TechEd Audience are ITPros; people that administer, operate the complex environments at today’s corporations. For these people we’ll have special tracks featuring information on Exchange, management and operations, security, portals and core Windows infrastructure.

Each of the audiences will have a lot of choices to make in the main session agenda. On top of that there will be instructor-led and self paced hands on labs, panels, ask-the-experts areas, Microsoft partners presenting their solutions and many, many more activities to connect attendees to share ideas and inspiration.

I’ll be regularly blogging about our progress on the content so stay tuned if you want to know what’s going on behind the screens of the biggest technical event in Europe.