Tech Ed 2009 Day 2 Recap
Day 2 started with my morning Triple Venti Soy, No Whip, No Foam Mocha with 4 scoops of Matcha from the Starbucks in the lobby of the Marriott LAX. Then I hopped onto the shuttle for the 35 – 40 minute ride from the hotel to the Convention Center. This particular bus driver took a different route than the driver from yesterday so we exited the freeway and drove past the USC campus. It’s been years since I went over there so I guess it was refreshing to get a view of the area compared to yesterday.
When I arrived at the Convention Center, I met up with Bob Maher who is the Director of UC Technical Audience Marketing. We did a quick video interview with Tech Ed Online where I had a chance to ask Bob some questions regarding Unified Communications and feedback he received from customers as well as his personal thoughts on what he likes about our UC solution and a few features he wished we offered. I will have links to this interview as soon as I get them.
From there, I went and worked at the UC Booth pretty much the rest of the day minus a small lunch break. Lunch break was very short because they ran out of some of the main dishes but had plenty of overcooked salmon.
I really enjoyed talking to all the customers that stopped by the booth. There were a lot of great questions asked regarding feature sets and architecture requirements for OCS 2007 R2. I also spoke with quite a few folks who were looking to deploy OCS 2007 R2 but had absolutely no idea what the product entailed. For anyone who falls into this category, I would highly encourage you to visit: https://www.microsoft.com/uc/default.mspx and read up on some of the introductory information and even download the product documentation to at least get a base foundation. This is helpful so you can know what questions to ask when coming to the booth or even as you sit through the different sessions and speak with the presenter.
Since the shuttle buses stop running at 9 PM, I had to catch a ride back to the hotel after dinner with my co-worker, Chris Avis. What should have been a simple task turned into an interesting adventure as Chris and I walked around trying to find his rental car in the Convention Center South Hall. Since Chris couldn’t remember exactly where he parked, we ended up walking all over the place trying to find the car. After a 15 minute search, we finally found it in Parking Lot D. Then we had to get onto 110 South but that wasn’t an easy task either as entry ramps were closed which forced us to drive around in circles. We finally got onto the 10 to 110 North and exited at 4th Street. From there we made a few more turns and got back onto the 110 South. Lesson learned? Don’t stay at a hotel that is 20 miles away from the venue. :-)
Time to get ready for bed so I can wake up nice and early and get to the Convention Center for another fun filled day. I will be doing some video interviews tomorrow so if you are here and want to share your thoughts about your experience at Tech Ed or with our products, please stop by the UC booth area.
Harold Wong