TechEds New Zealand and Australia: Here we come.

  • Article

I'm at the airport en route to New Zealand where I'll be meeting up with Mike Fitzmaurice, Angus Logan, Chris Johnson and Ian Morrish. I'll arrive in Auckland at 6am or so... and spend some time working on my session content. In the afternoon, we're catching the Australia vs. New Zealand Rugby Union Match. I have a vague understanding of what Rugby is (I lived in HK for a few years) so it should be interesting. I also plan on connecting with Ed Robinson, an ex-Microsoft Lead PM, who now works for a Microsoft NZ partner.

Sunday will be focused on preparing w/ my co-presenters to make sure we deliver high-quality content. Monday and Tuesday are session packed... and then on Tuesday I fly to Sydney to deliver the three sessions again.

So it's going to be an action-packed week... my only regret is that I'm not going to have enough time to spend in Sydney/Auckland outside of work since I head back the following Sunday.

I'm delivering the following three sessions with Angus Logan in NZ and Australia:

1. Office Keynote: I plan to cover some of the high-level investments and have 3 demos in the keynote. One demo focused on server/client investments, one on ECM and one on Search. Angus and Ian are going to be delivering some killer demos in this session! All our demos will be based on Beta 2 -- in fact -- based on the Beta 2 base VPC that we have available for customers... with content and customizations of course that we made for the keynote demos.

2. Web Content Management: This is going to be a fun session! Angus and I are going to essentially take a section of microsoft.com and putting it into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). In a matter of 60-70 minutes, we'll cover the WCM feature areas w/ MOSS.

3. Document Management and Records Management: Just like #1 and #2, a lot of demonstrations and a lot of content that we need to cover. We'll also cover workflow investments in WSS and MOSS... and very specifically point out what you get with WSS v3 vs. MOSS. This is a level 200 session, so it won't be as deep... but we'll cover a bunch of features.

Other great sessions to look out for: Enterprise Search (delivered by Fitz), SharePoint Development (delivered by Fitz) and CMS Migration (delivered by Chris Johnson). Must attend sessions if you are a SharePoint/Office developer or IT Pro... needless to say, CMS Migration is specific to customers/partners using CMS today.

Very important note: If you are a CMS customer/partner, you should attend the WCM, DM & RM, SharePoint Dev and Enterprise Search sessions as well!

I just sent a pic to the NZ team (not entirely sure why they needed it)... here's what I sent them. Just took that pic last night at my friend Uma's birthday party.