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MEDC, MEDC, MEDC ......

  • Artigo

I still vividly remember I was contacted by Derek Snyder, MEDC 2007 Content Owner, to be the XPe Track Owner, when I was in TechEd China last Sept. Now, MEDC 2007 is just 1.5 weeks away! WoW! (Check check: This year, all MEDC presentations need to have a WOW moment. This is one of my WOW moments:))

Looking back the last a few months as a first time XPe Track Owner, I got way too many things to share: the joy, the pain, the ups and the downs. I just decided I'll run a series on that. No? Too boring?

Our team is really making record history for this year's MEDC. We got 20 breakout sessions that range from basic XPe introduction to the latest development as well as topics on WEPOS, 4 instructor-led labs including one on using open source along with XPe, and 13 hands-on labs that almost cover all the key elements of our platform. No matter whether you are a newbie or a guru of XPe, you'll find a scoop of your favorites! Plus you get to meet a lot of us face to face, in the expert cabana area, lab rooms or the breakout session rooms. And we'll listen! We will have a bullet proof staffing schedule that ensures we have a good coverage on different areas and are accessible to whoever wants to meet us. Making the staffing schedule actually took a few rounds. It's almost baked, Andy is adding final touches.

Talking about Andy, yes, Andy used to be the XPe Track Owner for the past MEDCs. He provided me tons of helpful advice and tips (he does that not only on MEDC, by the way:-) ). But we are not in Kansas any more: The team has grown rapidly in the last 12 months, a lot of us are first-timers for MEDC; the team is loaded with a large number of other immediate deliverables; the conference this year has new requirements and processes such as all labs have to be done in Virual PC Images, not live hardware; nobody on the team has ever authored MEDC labs before. There were quite a lot of surprises and fire drills that I had to deal with (Don't you see I didn't blog for months? That's why.) : from the beginning of collecting the presentation and lab topics, get the speakers and lab authors, to push speakers/lab authors to get drafts done and submitted and then review all the decks and lab materials and give feedback, and to arrange the speaker dry run schedules and clarify lab requirements with the conference Lab Owner and more. In another word, about 20 team members had their teeth pulled by me to get all the MEDC materials done on time. Speakers and lab authors (hat off to them!) had to work long hours at night or weekends to meet the deadlines, among all other priorities and sickness in this flu season.

So, what happened was, one day when I entered a speaker's office and before I opened my mouth, he started first "No, unless you give me money". I ended up offering "cash back" when inviting people to the meetings on MEDC :(. Don't get it wrong that people on the team don't want to prepare for MEDC. As the matter of fact, we are all eager to fly over to MEDC and meet the participants. The team has been just too busy. To find out what exactly we are busy on, come to MEDC!

About 2 weeks ago, after months long work, we finally reached a big milestone that we could celebrate: all the presentation dry runs were done and all the labs were submitted and to be tested and deployed. We had pizza, very typical party food. Mark, our Product Unit Manager, also came to our little party and thanked all those who've been working on MEDC. That was a nice moment: I was finally not hated, but welcomed, because of the food :).

Just as we thought we are all done with MEDC, some lab authors got feedback from the lab testers that certain things need to be fixed. Ah, another fire drill.

As matter of fact, my role as the Track Owner is far away from done either. For example, we have MEDCs in a number of international regions outside US in the month of May and June. How to deliver the sessions that fit the local needs and also bring the latest updates to the international customers and engage with them is another big challenge that my team and local conference owners are working on. MEDC is just like any other big show, takes a lot of behind the scene work from a lot of people. I hope you will enjoy the conference, especially what we will offer on XPe. Stay tuned....

-Wendy

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