New Zealand Tech Ed 2007

It was great to see so many New Zealand ISVs at our recent Tech Ed 2007 event. If you weren't able to make it this year or missed out on purchasing a ticket, you can download the presentation decks on the TechEd Live site. Australia and New Zealand are very fortunate to have our own Tech Ed events and the great turnout we get each year is one of the reasons we can keep doing these events locally.

The feedback we received on the event was great and it sounds like Lou Carbone's keynote talk on creating great experiences resonated with a lot of you who build software for a living. If you didn't see the keynote because you weren't there, I highly recommend you watch the video. We have to thank Nigel for organising such a great keynote. 

User Experience is something that is getting much more attention these days and a lot of ISVs I talk to either already have or a looking to hire a User Experience* expert to help improve their products. "Improve their products" here means designing their product or service for humans to use in the real world rather than just adding all the features the product design team thinks a customer might use. As Lou talked about, products and services that give users a great experience will keep them coming back for more. 

I also want to thank our ISVs that participated in Tech Ed 2007 by either presenting in the Voice of the Customer track (Xero, ActionThis and WhereScape) or by participating in the "Make your mark video" (Xero, Ambient Design, Right Hemisphere and Animation Research). I always enjoy seeing what customers and partners are doing with our technology and products and Tech Ed is a fantastic chance to show it off at New Zealand's biggest technology conference.

So, another awesome event and I hope to see you all at next year's Tech Ed.

*I am lumping User Experience, Interaction Design and Usability into one group here, while technically they are different they all hopefully lead to an improved experience for the end customer/user.