Microsoft TechEd 2012 Russia

Last week I’ve visited Microsoft TechEd 2012 in Russia, Moscow. In this post I would like to share some emotions and impressions from the conference.

Everything for me began on Friday’s evening November 23rd, when I received the invitation to the conference as a presenter of a mini session about planning in TFS. As the conference started on Tuesday November 27th, I’ve got a real lack of time for booking flight, hotel and getting business trip permission on my job. I can say that all documents were signed five minutes before taxi to airport had arrived. It was rather challenging )))

But, at last, I’ve found myself in Moscow and in the early morning I was in the Krokus Hall, ready to register and take active participation in the event.

The Conference opening plenary session was rather impressive, with the participation of Microsoft top managers Kirill Tatarinov and Scott Guthrie. It was impressive, dynamic, with a large number of demonstrations of Windows Azure and Windows 8.

After a small break, it was a start for two days interactive session marathon: 15 presentations simultaneously from the early morning till the late evening. In 30 minutes breaks it was time for trying new products from Microsoft and its partners on special stands, and listening to mini sessions. No free minute at all.

Now several words about sessions I’ve attended:

  • IT KPI: how to measure and evaluate IT. It was rather interesting, through I’ve used in my work most of the presented principles, it was great to see that I’m running the work of my department in the right way. Also some metrics were presented from interesting point of view, and I will for sure implement some experience in my day-to-day activities.
  • Set of Business Intelligence (BI) sessions. The main and even discouraging, from the first look, was the announcement that Microsoft changed BI tremendously. In SQL Server 2012 they have implemented new tabular model for Analysis Services, also giving users the ability to work with OLAP directly from Excel using Power Pivot and PowerView. But the presenter Marco Russo was really great and through demonstrations has shown that new functionality expands use of Analysis Services, giving business people opportunity to use BI really in every day work. Also, together with classic OLAP model, new model and features provide us (IT guys) with quite an unlimited flexibility in building BI solutions. I think I will try this in the nearest future and of course post my experiences )))
  • Set of TFS sessions. Most of them were concentrated on new Web interface of TFS 2012, and as we’re planning to migrate on the 2012 version of TFS next year, I hope that knowledge I’ve got will be rather useful.
  • Set of SQL Server sessions. Most of them were in mini session format where we could discuss how SQL Server works, optimization issues, some features of SQL. Also I have visited session of SQL Server geek with low-level report about TempDB database. It was something fantastic; I could hardly remember when I got such amount of new information in one hour. And I cannot say that this topic was new for me.

Speaking about my session, it was about long-term planning in TFS and was based on some information posted in this blog. I can say that it was quite of great interest, as I the discussion with audience after it lasted for quite a long period of time and was rather emotional.

To sum up, it was a great experience for me to attend TechEd conference and I will try not to miss it next year.

Below you can find some more photos from the event, starting with an Angry Birds game on a really huge touch screen under Windows 8 ))))

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