Ed Wilson: What happens when you get 5000 nerds together?

What happens when you bring 5000 nerds from around the world and place them in a single building? Well if they are Microsoft employees, they begin to talk about computers. This week I am at the TechReady conference in Seattle, having been invited to speak about using Windows PowerShell to remotely administer the Windows 7 desktop, and it has already been an exciting, enlightening, and invigorating time. There are several things that are great about TechReady.

The first is the opportunity to attend sessions presented by Program Managers, Product Managers, and Lead Developers from our product groups this is an excellent time to hear about our technology directly from the horse’s mouth—if anyone should know how Microsoft technologies work, it should be the people who were in charge of writing the things.

The second great thing about TechReady is that it gives us who work on the product groups a chance to talk to the people who are in the field and who are in charge of helping our customers deploy and utilize our products. This is because the people who attend TechReady are Technical Account managers, Consultants, and Premier Field Engineers … the types of people whose jobs are to work directly with Premier Customers. The people who work in the Premier Services organization are an excellent source of feedback to the product groups. They tell us what things work and more importantly, what things do not work.

The third great thing about TechReady is the opportunity to see and to talk to people from all around the world. Yesterday I talked to a guy from Lima Peru who I had never met before. The cool thing is he knew two of my friends in Lima I had met while teaching my WMI and my VBScript workshops down there. Talking to him, reminiscing about old friends was fun. More importantly was the opportunity to talk to him about how his customers are using Windows PowerShell. We talked about the challenges they are having in deploying it to the desktop, setting the execution policy, and migrating existing VBScripts over to Windows PowerShell 1.0. How soon does he anticipate his customers moving to Windows PowerShell 2.0, and what features are they excited about were also topics that came into the conversation.

After talking to him, I ran into a couple of guys from Germany. I did not know them, but they were friends with one of my friends who had arranged for me to deliver a workshop to customers in Regensburg Germany. The conversation was energetic as we talked about plans for Windows PowerShell 2.0 and best practices for implementing the remoting features. It was a lively exchange of ideas.

Oh yeah, I also went to some pretty cool sessions. TechReady is great! I cannot wait to see what the rest of the week brings.