Gerd's Professional World

Over the 2 weeks in November in Barcelona we will touch in total about 8.500 people. And still we want to extend our reach and provide our delegates with an enhanced online user experience. Therefore I am happy to write that “The Virtual Side” of both our events went live yesterday:

http://www.mseventseurope.com/Teched/06/Pre/Live/DefaultITF.aspx

 http://www.mseventseurope.com/Teched/06/Pre/Live/DefaultDev.aspx 

The Virtual Side will allow non-attendees to get a glimpse of the events and all that is going on. The delegates themselves will see a different side of the event that otherwise they would never get to see. At regular time in the run up to the events we will publish new content and during the events we will publish daily new content and video streams. Dot Net Rocks will be featured as well as IT's Showtime, TechNet Radio, Channel 9, INETA etc.

TE-DEV is wonderful but TE-ITF is doing superb. Including all the people that we have to allow we have reached our capacity of 4.000+ attendees. We are already well over that number. We will look into creative solutions to get more people in (mainly a catering problem) but ealry next week we will need to put the signage 'SOLD OUT" on our website.

What a day last Friday. The last day before we close our Early Bird offering (save €300) is always an exciting and stressful day: how many registrations will we get and how many last minute questions will we get.

And you blew the whole thing. If we include all the people that we have to allow to come in, being as part of a sponsor or exhibitor contract, our speakers of course etc we exceeded our target number of 3.000 attendees already and this more than a month before the actual event.

We are now forecasting that this event will have 4.000 attendees or more or less a sell out. There are still a couple of hundred tickets available. But don't wait too long.

The closer we come, we need to look into evaluations gifts. And again we have been able to secure/buy high value prices.

This year the overall conference feedback gift for 1 of the attendees of each event is a DELL Windows MEDIA CENTER PC. If that isn't nice ...

Further we are providing Creative Zen Vision M for all other feedback forms. We surely looked into the Zune, but November will be too soon.

Friday our early bird offer (save €300) ends and it seems to have triggered quite some people asking for a free or reduced ticket.

For projects of this size we must follow strict guidelines and rules and surely in the ticket space. All rules and guidelines are set in stone from the beginning. Otherwise you don't know where you end and it is a small world.

And people can be very creative in justifying their request ... oh yeah. We try to setup a quality event with the right content and speakers, and that has a price, as well for internal as external people. The best proof is that we will host about 8.000 people. Tech Ed: IT Forum will surely sell out. 

People can always ask but they need to be fair and accept a "No" as well. It is not fun to answer all these mails.

The registrations are ahead of last year's trend for Tech Ed: IT Forum. If you know that we sold out last year with more than 4.000 attendees ... you know what to do if you want to be there.

We are 2 weeks away from early bird (September 29) and knowing that we had a spike of 800 people the last week before the early bird last year ... I am curious to see this year. We expect to sell out earlier than last year.

Also the developer event is going stellar. Maybe this will sell out as well. There is a lot of positive buzz in the community and a fantastic line-up of speakers.

As part of our efforts to reach as many people as possible with our events we are working on a virtual Tech Ed. This does not mean that we will publish all sessions on line. Not at all. Our objective is to provide the online community with short interviews, overviews etc of what is going in Barcelona. This will not only give outsiders a feeling of the events but also a "behind the scenes" view for attendees.

We will have several initiatives that will cover Tech Ed EMEA and we will post all content on our event website:

• Channel 9 video casts
• INETA video casts
• Dot Net Rocks shows
• TechNet radio
• podcasts
• Daily Tech Ed News from our own camera and interview team

This is going to be fun.

The last 2 weeks I have been visiting the people in the different Microsoft subsidiaries who are driving the local efforts for Tech Ed: Developers and Tech Ed: IT Forum. I was in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The UK I did before the holidays. The only country with a big contingent of attendees I miss is the Netherlands. It did not work out because of our different holiday schedules ... and they are doing great in numbers anyway.

My conclusion is positive. It has been very valuable face-2-face time. The champs are taking their responsibility and inform their community and the internal Microsoft people. It is an EMEA wide effort. You would be amazed how many people want to do something or have to say something about the events.

Although maybe some countries could perform a little better in attendee numbers we are ahead of our forecasts. We are surely on track to sell out Tech Ed: IT Forum (4.000 + attendees) and have 3.000 + attendees at Tech Ed: Developers. It is going to be amazing. I have never seen a better speaker lign up for the developer event.

4th Scandinavian country in 4 days. I know now how expensive alcohol and taxis are over here :-).

Almost complete silence in the Microsoft Office. They are having their annual company meeting to align and inform the business units about their Finnish FY07 (July 2006 - June 2007) plans and actions.

Happily Eva Paloluoma (IT Pro champ) freed up time to meet me.