Johnny Harbieh

Notes on TechEd 2013 North America

I attended my first ever TechEd conference last week, and what a deal that was. Definitely, an awesome place to be at. A ton of people, I heard close to 10K, but cannot confirm. The place was New Orleans, LA at the convention center.

I think to summarize my experience there, and looking ahead, I could say

    • A great conference to attend for sure. Your time will not be wasted and it is worth every penny you spend on it
    • Great content with a wide array of topics and choices for the IT Pro and Developer types who are looking to grow and expand their skillsets beyond what they do everyday
    • The speakers are awesome and well known in their respective industries
    • Interesting set of vendors. I saw few that appear at the SharePoint Conferences, but also a ton of vendors I never heard of
    • The closing party was really cool, with Tina Tuner showing up and Drew Brees throwing footballs to attendees
    • And yes, we all got a couple of Surface devices. Each attendee had a choice to buy one or both: a Surface Pro and/or Surface RT at a discounted price
    • I loved the Birds of Feather sessions or should I say BOF sessions
    • I got to see some of my friends from the SharePoint community, which was all awesomeness
    • There were some really cool announcements on Azure pricing, such as: not paying for stopped services / instances. In the past, we would shut down a service and we would have had to delete it. Now, we can just leave it out there in a Stopped state.

Check out the Keynote for more http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/Key01#fbid=B2JfTpWjgos

Now, from a messaging and content standpoint, the following key topics were addressed in a lot of different ways

  • Cloud First Architecture and what that means
  • Hybrid models with Office 365, Azure, SharePoint
  • System Center and Private Cloud
  • Self Service BI along with Big Data Analytics
  • A ton of developer content on
    • SharePoint Apps + Hosting models
    • Windows Phone and Windows 8

Anyways, overall, what a great conference. I hope to be able to make it to one again.

Till next time, take it easy

#SharePoint #CharPoint #TTC

Links and Resources

Official TechEd site http://northamerica.msteched.com

Channel9 event site http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013