Hi everyone,
A great 2nd week for Tech Ed in Orlando last week where we focused on the IT Pro Audience. Again, fantastic traffic throught the BI hands-on labs, break-outs, and demo stations, as thousands of customers got their hands on PerformancePoint Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and all the Microsoft BI products.
Based on the attendee account at all of the structured sessions over the course of both weeks (but not counting the endless booth traffic), over 5,200 attendees in our sessions, a huge increase from last year--and given that BI is such a huge focus for the company, it's not a bit surprising. Here are some of the comments from the attendes that really show the great job by the MSFT team on-site:
Here are some examples of direct comments from customers who attended BI sessions:
“Carolyn Chau was an excellent presenter. I consider myself pretty cynical by nature and when she said that the demos would be 'fun' I was rolling my eyes. Ms. Chau had an infectious enthusiasm for the material however. Her cheery attitude and the excitement she had when going through the demonstrations should be a model for other presenters. It was hard not to be drawn into the presentation with the level of energy she was putting out. I expected a painful 75 minutes but I was pleasantly surprised. Grats to Ms. Chau.”
“For me - this was likely the best "practical" session that I took away from TechEd. The ability to present operational scorecard / KPI / Metrics published via a SharePoint site to showcase my IT operational data is invaluable. The presenters mentioned the steps that they went through to build the dashboards/KPI/etc -- and stated that they may release the detail and steps they did to build the demo in a TechNet article perhaps later on. Please, please, please ... make this available to the community. The type of dashboarding and metric delivery is absolutely essential and something everyone needs to know how to do within their IT Operations environment.”
“This was the best session I attended so far in the conference. The preparation was excellent!!!”
“Great information on deploying Integration Services Packages. Anyone working with SSIS should attend this session.”
“This is a great session. It's not a presentation of where a speaker sits up on stage and repeats their PowerPoint presentation. This is a fun interactive session that shows most of the new features in the BI tool stack while having a blast doing it...”
“You need to have this session all the time. It would be awesome if the other groups would do the same type of thing A++”
“Carolyn did a good job of explaining the new features of the tool and presented valuable information.”
“Excellent speaker - very clear explanations of difficult points. Will really help me with my cubes.”
“Nice overview of the new features of Analysis Services, Reporting Services, SharePoint Integration tools and products. There are so many features here it is almost impossible to cover most of them into any depth and detail. But the speakers did a great job in keeping us interested in what's going on.”
“Presenter did an excellent job of presenting the content.”
Thanks again to Kathy Sabourin and the entire Microsoft BI team for their hard work and success in the last 2 weeks. It was a fantastic experience to meet with so many of our partners and customers, and really see firsthand the excitement that everyone has for the Microsoft business intelligence solutions.