TechEd US 2008 IT Professionals, Day Three

Another day on booth duty. Not much excitement here but the motorcycle giveaway by Avepoint drew a pretty big crowd. The SharePoint Nation is well represented in the exhibit hall; the only partner zone banner hanging this week was for SharePoint. I didn’t take a formal survey but it seemed as if there were at least five or six rows of nothing but SharePoint-related products and services. We were positioned across from Syntergy and next to The Dot Net Factory and BPA Solutions. I felt a bit bad for the Fujitsu and Blue Coat folks as they seemed a bit out of place amongst all the SharePointness going on.

After ten full days of being on my feet and nine nights of socializing I was completely knackered. I had a quiet dinner (once again ruined by apathetic waiters and an inedible steak. What is it about this place?) with Andrew Connell, Polly Hackathorn of The Ted Pattison Group, and a few others (sorry, Ryan, Seth, and Mike, I don’t know your blog URL’s – please email them to me if you’re reading this). We traded war stories on some of the most ridiculous things we’ve encountered working in technology, especially with government and military clients, and various misadventures travelling around the world. I retired to my room and managed to get to bed before midnight for the first time since arriving in Orlando for Developers week.

Tomorrow is the last day and, as much as I want desperately to get home, I’m going to miss seeing all my friends and fellow MVP’s. It seems like we’ve hung out together the entire first half of this year, what with Office Developer Conference, SharePoint Conference, MVP Summit, and TechEd. I think we all need a break from conferencing for a while. Notably missing from this year’s event was the entire European contingent (although I did see Patrick Tissegham for all of five minutes and Kevin Laahs was lurking about). Most of them opted to save their travel dollars for TechEd EMEA in Barcelona this November. Can’t really blame them after all the travelling so far this year.

Friday morning I’ll finally get a chance to attend a session and will be sitting in on Adam Buenz’s SharePoint security talk. At SPC Adam gave one of the funniest presentations I’ve ever seen and I can’t help but wonder what he’s got in store this year. Unfortunately, it’s at 8:30 in the morning, which is the worst time slot of all (except for 4:30 Friday afternoon, where they stuck AC for his Code Access Security presentation). I wonder if I’ll be able to adjust to getting up at a normal hour???