It's over. I'm home (late night flight back), slept for over 10 hours, and my voice is gone. So on the one hand I'm glad it's over because it was killer. But on the flip side, I already have 10 additional things I wish I could go back to the conference for. Questions to ask, demos to see, sessions that conflicted with other sessions that I wanted to see.
Microsoft does a superb job running conferences and the lunch today was a great case in point. The lunch today was box lunches - because the last session ended at 1:15 and many people (including some from our company) then had to run for the airport. So they grabbed a box lunch and ate in the taxi.
Kudos to Microsoft across the board for doing a great job not just on the big items (great sessions) but the little items too.
At 2:00 one of the vendors was giving away a Bugatti Motorcycle - and they had 2,000+ people there for the drawing. Mass pandemonium with everyone cheering or moaning as they called out each digit. They drew 4 before they had a winner... And that person didn't have the ticket. They had a photo of the ticket on their iPhone. So back to drawing and a couple more before they got a winner who was present. Lots of fun to watch.
Nothing new or special today. But the feeling remains - everyone involved in SharePoint; Microsoft, vendors, attendees - they all see that they are part of this game changer. I talked to people who said they're not really sure what their company will gain from SharePoint but they are going all in because they are confident it will mean some major improvements.
On a personal note, I realized that a lot of the time I would talk to someone going by our booth and they would say that they were not interested in reporting. So I would give them our 20 second spiel - and they would then many times be interested enough to ask a couple of questions. I would answer those and they would then ask for a demo. In many cases they would be there for 5 - 15 minutes.
On the development side we tend to denigrate the salespeople. But in many cases sales is letting people know what we can do for them. In our case it's letting people know there is a radically simpler way to design reports.
And the show ended with one of the nicest discussions I had there. Two people from the Department of the Interior stopped by to look at Windward. The Secretary of the Interior is Ken Salazar who was previously Senator for Colorado (where we are located). I've interviewed Secretary Salazar and think he's a terrific Secretary. The two people from DOI love him too so it was a very pleasant discussion with the two of them.
See you next year.
Thumbnails of all sessions at Microsoft SharePoint Conference Sessions.
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