TechEd 2007, Day 3

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TechEd 2007, Day 3

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10:00AM
 
More business at the hotel before I make my way back to the exhibition hall.  First thing I run into is Adam and The World’s Greatest Hangover.  He looked like he’d just gone ten rounds with Peterbuilt.  Not your finest moment, my friend.
 
We’re not there five minutes and the WSS kiosk starts going crazy.  There’s four of us fielding questions and people still piling up.  This goes on until 2:00PM before we finally get a break.  I guess world finally got out the the SharePoint gurus were in the back of the building (naturally) and it was Q&A time.  On the upside I don’ think I heard anyone ask Adam ‘What is SharePoint’ so I don’t think he’ll have to wring anyone’s neck today.
 
3:00PM
 
After debating whether or not to sit in on a session or two, I decided instead to go upstairs and take the 70-631 WSS Configuration exam.  We’ve got a couple of people studying for it and I figured it would be good to check it out before sending them off on their own.  I also figured that if I couldn’t pass it cold without any prep I might as well hang up my SharePoint boots and find something productive to do with my life. 
 
I’ll save you the suspense – I passed with an 809 but I’m worried about our junior SharePointers.  The test was comprised almost entirely of networking questions – load balancing configuration, ip conflicts, farm setups, monitoring and log files, etc.  There were maybe 7 good SharePoint questions on the whole test.  Not at all what I was expecting.  Gonna have to rethink our strategy and maybe put folks into the dev test instead as they’re much more familiar with site definitions than trace logs.
 
5:00PM
 
Back to the kiosk to lend a hand but they don’t really need any help now.  The flood has finally slowed to a trickle and Rahul from Microsoft has got it under control. I hang out ’til 7:00 just to keep him company.  Amanda, Heather and AC stop by for a chat.  Heather thinks she completely blew her branding presntation but one of my contacts who went said she did pretty well.  AC was just trying to escape from a motormouth who’d been bendin his ear all afternoon.  Can’t blame ’em for being enthusiastic, I suppose.  Now it’s off to find some dinner and catch up on some business before hooking up with Bob (or Mr. Omalley or whatever he’s calling himself tonight) and the gang for more socializing.   
 
10:00PM
 
Word of warning – never open your email when you know Bob Fox is about to call with instructions on where to report for the night’s drinking binge.  After finally breaking away from the computer I met up with the gang at the DoubleTake party being hosted at the Hard Rock Cafe.  Believe it or not the band was called ‘Cluster-Funk’.  Honest.  They were pretty good, too.  The party petered out around midnight and after the five mile hike back to the car and an hour spent wandering around trying to find Bob’s hotel (Hey, Hertz – how about putting some GPS units that aren’t five years old in your cars, eh?), I was done.  Tomorrow’s the big attendee party so we’ll so how that goes.