Blogging MS-HUG TechForum - Day 2

The second and last day of the MS-HUG TechForum is over and everybody has gone home with a load of information, a book, a t-shirt and a bunch of connections.

We started with a keynote by Mika Krammer, director for mobile PC product marketing in the Windows division, on the value of Windows Vista in mobile scenarios such as healthcare and followed up with two parallel tracks, one dedicated to developers and one for IT Pros.

There were several good sessions, like the one from Formotus about their solution for forms for mobile devices, the session on secure health messaging and Exchange Hosted Services and the session on HL7 CDA applications for the Personal Health Record with Liora Alschuler.

I led a panel on interoperability with several experts from the industry:

It was my first panel as a moderator and I had fun doing it and putting the speaker on the spot ;-)

The day ended with a very good session from Dr. Bill Crounse on the trends that are transforming the way we deliver and consume healthcare.

We heard great feedback on the forum as a whole as well as ways that we can use to improve:

  • Introduce a rating system for the technical level of the session, similar to the one used in other Microsoft conferences (100-introductory...400-not for n00bs)
  • schedule a series of webcasts before the conference to cover the basics and then focus on the advanced topics during the TechForum (improving on what we did this year with the webcasts for Windows Vista and Office)
  • skip the marketing and "this is why you need this product" stuff and get to the point, most people coming to MS-HUG are already sold on the Microsoft technology (I hope)

Do you have other suggestions?? Let us know!

I hope to see you at the next MS-HUG TechForum, scheduled for February 25-26, 2007 in New Orleans, in conjunction with the HIMSS 2007 annual conference.