Georgia on My Mind

Another Tech-Ed is in the books. This year, Tech-Ed North America was hosted in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC).

Over the last few years, I've attended several Tech-Ed conferences, from the Boston "T" Party, to Barcelona Spain, and the two "LA's" (Los Angeles, and New Orleans, Louisiana) and each one seems to have its own personality. This year, I would say the theme was "Cloud Platform", and the mood "subdued".

By subdued, I don't mean "slow" or "poorly attended". This show was neither. With hundreds of sessions, and around 10,000 attendees, there was plenty of interest to go around. I simply mean that there wasn't as much "exuberance" as I have seen in past shows. Everyone was here "with a purpose", and extremely focused on the real-world application of the techniques and technologies on offer.

Cloudy, with a Choice of Platforms

Everywhere you looked, the focus was on using one tool or another as a platform to build on:

• Windows Phone 7
• Windows Client
• SharePoint
• Azure (Windows and SQL)
• Hyper-V
• Office

And, in almost every case, the emphasis was to host it "In the Cloud". But that didn't necessarily mean externally hosted. No, this year, "the Cloud" could just as easily apply to services hosted within your organization. Hand in hand with the internal cloud were virtualization and dynamic configuration - even moving systems and portions of systems between internal and externally hosted services.

Walk the Walk

The GWCC is huge, and Tech-Ed NA 2011 pretty much took up the whole thing. It could take almost the entire break time between sessions to get from one end to the other. As a member of the TLC booth staff, I spent much of my time at the conference on the Exposition floor. This was on exactly the opposite end of the center from the room set up as a dining area.

The dining area itself was huge. If you're going to feed 10,000 people in less than two hours, you need a lot of space!

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1

Last, but not least, there was one major SharePoint related announcement at Tech-Ed: SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Service Pack 1 will be available near the end of June. In addition to the usual array of fixes, SP1 will include a number of enhancements:

• Support for Internet Explorer 9 Native Mode and Google Chrome
• Site Recycle Bin
• Shallow Copy
• StorMan.aspx
• SQL 11 Support

I'll talk more about these enhancements in my next post.

Don't forget to check out the Live MVP Chat tomorrow (Wednesday, May 25th) at 12:00 noon Eastern time!