I’ve been down in San Diego for the Windows Connections/Exchange Connections conference this week. Even though I hadn’t been accepted as a speaker this time around, I was eager to go heckle my co-authors at their session Secret Sauce: Best Recipes from the Exchange Cookbook. Instead, they ended up dragging me up on the stage with them to help present the material. Tom, Missy, and I had fun, and we got a lot of good feedback from the audience. I had fun up on stage and even received a couple of compliments about my stage presence. All the theater in high school paid off, it seems! For those of you who were at the session and haven’t downloaded the slides (or even if you just want to see what Tom and Missy cooked up), you can get the Powerpoint slide deck here.
Somehow, we never quite managed to get Paul, Tom, Missy, and myself all in the same room at the same time — three out of four was the best we could do. Next time, darn it.
This was a great conference to attend, especially as it was my first major industry conference. Connections is large enough to offer a solid variety of interesting sessions, but small enough that you are seeing familiar faces all the way through the week. I got to see old friends, renew many acquaintainces, and meet a lot of interesting and talented people for the first time in person. I even got to do some late-night singing and find a Texas Hold’em game or two.
The other cool thing that happened this morning: I got the heart-warming bit of news that the book vendor here at the conference completely sold out all of the copies of the Exchange Server Cookbook
. In fact, our book was the #2 top mover at this conference, second only to the truly fantastic Protect Your Windows Network : From Perimeter to Data (Microsoft Technology) by Steve Riley and Jesper Johansson, both of Microsoft (I’ll be posting a review of it later today as I’m waiting for my plane back to Seattle).
Unfortunately, all of my notes and handouts are packed away, so I’ll be posting an item or two over the next several days to highlight all the seriously cool stuff I saw at Connections. If you can at all make the time for the Spring event, I urge you to come.
Special shout-out to Amy Eisenburg and Lisa Pere of Windows IT Pro (“More drink tickets?”), Kevin Laahs of HP (“Just make up the words!”), my co-authors, and the many fine people who helped ensure my first Connections conference was a great experience.