You could have guessed what I’ve been up to from yesterdays live pictures and social events. Of course, there is far more than meets the eye when it comes to business meetings – while its perfectly fine to grab someone people ought to see at a party, its not quite the same taking pictures with people you’re trying to close big deals with.

Yesterday, meetings were the core value of the day. What is particularly interesting is that none of my meetings were direct, they were all partner to partner to partner meetings where a number of us were getting together to provide a solution. That, by itself, is the reason you come to the big meetings and come to the WWPC. I know some of you guys look at me (someone called me a TITAN in their blog) but at the end of the day, I am here to copy Microsoft. Open business model, honest service, straight forward pricing and focus on a partner model (again, if you were an OWN partner you’d know my concept, why I do what I do and more specifically why I say what I say, even if you scratch your head about some things)

Keynotes

Ok. Frankly, it was all about “innovation” but thats a Microsoft term for “here are all these ideas we’ve stolen or bought from our partners and are now calling it Microsoft *.*” – and next year we’re going to steal twice as much!!! Have to hand it to them, they were quite energizing about the whole prospect and the solution stack and tried to dance as hard as they could away from the core (Client/Server) and towards dynamics, services, hosting, presence, entertainment, mobility, portability. Frankly, it puts up a huge stamp on the fact that Microsoft is going for the capex because those solutions came with a hefty price tag. A very hefty one. The quote of the day?

We’re not a 503(c) charity, we’re here to make money and win business.

SBSC hat on: Whether the majority of the world will become IT basic / esential or strategic is the largest bet this multibillion dollar company will ever make. They are betting that bigger is better and in my heart I believe a majority of my customer base is IT basic that only uses IT as a part of the business, it does not build a business on technology.

Vlad: What should Microsoft be afraid of? Well, thats between me and Steve but here is a little tip for the borgs in the reading audience: You got here with the ISVs and service shops. You continue to go against us, squeeze us out of our markets, solution portfolios and…. well… it just might become more lucrative and reasonable for an ISV to focus on those IT essential / basic platforms like MacOS and Linux and develop for the emerging markets where software can be sold for years without the threat of Microsoft squeezing you out before you’ve covered your R&D. Just food for thought folks…

Tweetie Bird Lounge

Absolutely awesome. There was a nice cocktail reception last night and literally everyone was there, packed in a tiny yellow room. Again, Lynnette saved the day and really pulled off a great event though I can’t blog that in detail. Let’s just say that we all had a great time thanks to her efforts.

I spent perhaps an hour or so working in the lounge and got a chance to talk to the people in SMB about the things we find relevant, who is meeting with who, whats the roadmap, where are the opportunities, who do you need to see. This is the value of the community at its finest, you paid $1800 to be in this hall, now how do you optimize that time and make sure you get every pennys worth? By asking for advice.

Parties, Parties, Parties

Went to the US party first, at the Invesco Field. Had an awesome reception at the club house and got to talk to some of the Microsoft folks that I really respect and am waiting patiently to get sick of Microsoft  What can I say, its a hiring trip.

Microsoft spent quite a chunk of change on the party. After Dave Sobel of EvolveTech won the customer service award we went to the field to watch the concert. I’m much younger than most of the crowd here and the name of the geezer they dug up to play escapes me at the moment… “I want a new drug” or something was this guys hit.

More Parties

After the concert about 8 of us got into an SUV and took off to the UK party. During the first hour I really had a great time. I met so many UK partners, talked shop, geek stuff, played pool, shot a bandit, danced with her majesty. What happened after that is a bit blurry to say the least, I am sure I will receive incriminating photos shortly. When will I learn that I just can’t go out drinking with the British folks?

Today: Big client meetings. Tomorrow: Vlad free-for-all, if you want to talk shop, community, etc I have kept the day clear because meetings always get rescheduled at the last moment, cancelled, moved, running late, have to go off early, etc. Things happen, thats business. And thats why I always keep the last day of the week clear on my schedule so anyone that wants to meet me can just give me a call and we hook up where-ever we can find the nearest table.

Alright world, and particularly UK and Florida…. who OWNS your segment? I wrote at length about why WWPC matters, who the big players are and how you can learn from the people at the top of your game. No Susan Bradley, but look closely:

If you don’t know more than one of these people (aside from me) you are not doing as well as you could be! Top to bottom: The Smartest Cookie, The Closer, The PAL, The Seller, Robbie++, The Hookup, The Pitch. You need a little bit of each to be immensely successful so if you don’t know who these people are….. you really ought to listen to me.

What an awesome day. I am going back to do the parties in a few minutes but here are a few shots to let you feel like you were here. Welcome!

Forefont chokes aliens with some white text on the side. Brilliant. Microsoft Marketing dollars at work.

Big place, lots of people. They definitely made meals better this year.

KeynoZzzZzzzZzzzZzzz… Actually, they were pretty good. No lamers on guitars.

Tweeetie bird lounge, SBSC central.

Molson?

And the biggest, most important, this is why you pay $1,800 for the ticket slide of WWPC:

Click on the image to download the bigger version if you can’t make out the text. I’ll give you my take on it after WWPC has closed up and I still have the same feelings but the above is essentially where Microsoft is going with their computer strategy. Look at that long and hard, I often get these “told you so” moments years after the announcements were made, usually from people with the inability to see the roadmap more than a year down the road.

Microsoft made the announcement today. 1–3 years out, when this becomes reality… I dunno.

Preday is in the books and I have to say it was better than I expected it would be. Compared to last year the keynotes were disappointing, but I’m not the keynote kind of a guy so you can take that with a grain of salt; I just found the content last year far more interesting, valuable and meaningful and Warrilow keynote was easilly the best. The only bright spot to break up meaningless keynotes were hilarious infomercial introductions for the speakers, sort of poking fun back at the keynote idea all together. Anyone taking bets to see if Eric Ligman was behind the production of these?

Click to watch the SMB Symposium Infomercial Videos (17mb, wmv only)

(don’t get me wrong, I understand the keynote concept and I appreciate why they do it - this is a showcase event and there are always those 20% of people that have been under a rock. They came to this event to catch up because they haven’t had the time or interest to keep up with the technology or Microsoft isn’t a big enough of a partner to warrant the focus. However, and specifically for the SMB sector, I feel its ones professional duty to stay on top of the technology news, training, etc…. and for 80% of us that made the trek and took a week off from our duties I would rather have spent all day in the side sessions)

Lunch was pretty cool as well. Each table had a specific discussion subject so you could sit with your peers that were interested in the same subject you are. Dave Sobel and I sat at the Giving Good Customer Service table simply for the irony showcase but I will admit that in the discussions between him, Susanne, Robbie, Tim and a few others I did pick up some things that we will be implementing soon at OWN – nothing earth shattering or life changing, but service is about the details and the more you can pick up and bounce off your peers the better off your stuff comes out.

Speaking of Side Sessions

Even better than last year and there was an official networking lounge. I hopped back and forth between a few of them because I didn’t want to miss as many as I did. I watched the presentation on the ResponsePoint VoIP solution from Microsoft, I went to the Exchange 2007 one, I sat through the entire presentation Susanne Dansey did and went back and forth through a few others all of which were spectacular and I wish I could have been in all of them at the same time. But what can you do.

Skip this part if you’re not into Susanne Fan Club stuff. With as many conferences as I’ve been to there is always that one person, that one presentation or that one conversation that basically pays for your trip. Susanne’s presentation on customer service was easilly it. I can go home now. It was funny, it was on the point but more importantly it really helped me put into perpective how to deal with difficult people. Thankfully, most of our business is with partners and I have to admit that they are all pretty much wonderful and understanding… but customers. Ever look at the phone and think to yourself – “Do I feel like having my day ruined by this person, again?” – Susanne’s presentation gave me some insight to how to fix that and how to do a little bit better with this particular pain point. Just like Warrilow’s presentation, it addressed the current pain point and gave me something I never got from my business books.

(sneak peak: it’s ok if you don’t believe me; I recorded the entire presentation and will make it available to Susanne to do with what she wishes. For now you’ll have to take my word for it, this was about as good as it gets)

Local Representation

All my local Microsoft people are here. All except The Greg Boyd, best sales person on the face of the earth. I wrote about this earlier, but Jessica Emmons, James Cuomo, Rene Alamo, JJ Antequino… everyone seems to be here. Why is this relevant? Because I do business with these folks year round and I rarely get to see them, once a quarter if I’m lucky and the calendar matches up. But while I am here I get to hear what their plans for the year are, what they will and wont likely have the chance to do – and I can plan my local market engagements based on that as well as the community aspect. For most SMB partners whose engagement is 100% local I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t show up for at least one day.

Networking

Aside from the brief moments of Susanneshine, these conferences are far more about networking, exchanging ideas and partnering than they are about presentation content and keynotes. This year the SMB Symposium dedicated a cool room just for this. Tables, couches, drinks, etc. This is incredibly valuable for me because I partner with a lot of these folks and we generally don’t get to sit down and talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. The ugly is what I really need to know because the products and services we deliver are selling like crazy so addressing the problems and issues we are not aware of is critical. Also finding out how to make those products and services work better for our clients is incredibly important because it drives the feature set based on the actual users needs. It also helps to show some… uhm… pride… in what you do and really try to find the best solution or at least a good compromise. Kudos to the Symposium folks for arranging this.

Thats not the Opportunity I smell…

Overall, the venue was better, the organization was awesome, the discussions, presentations, networking opportunities and everything else was just executed perfectly. And if you wanted to talk to a vendor, you could. Nearly all the partner/customer facing people from the companies most of us do business with were present at this event and I even got to chat with Augie Gonzales from Citrix. There was no push, there was no stunt, there was no cattle driving – just networking with other respected professional in this business, regardless of the segment that they were in. I hope other conference organizers pick up on this suttle thing – vendor participation shouldn’t be about booth babes and big bright signs because SMB ITPRO folks are savvy and most of the time sales oriented as well. The little gimmics that get pulled at trade shows don’t really work up here – I mean thanks for the tshirt and all but I’m looking for something to help me serve my customers so lets talk about how we do that.

In the end, thats what SMB Symposium did (at least for me) and thats why I urged you folks to give it a chance.

Presenter is discussing the current SMB roadmap:

“I encurage you to stay with that SBS product as we move along” stressing that you can still do business over the next 18 months as the (above) releases come through. According to internal figures the SBS is still selling well and there is no dropoff in the enthusiasm among SMB customers for that first server, building of the network infrastructure. Message: Please don’t defer your purchases and installations. He did miss out an opportunity to pitch SA though

Anne is “giving feedback” about the Partner Finder and weeding out the Flower Shop and Attorney partners that signed up for an Action Pack.

Here are a few pictures to give you a look at the SMB Symposium going on right now (live blog from the keynote.. Zzzzzz… SMB is growing…. Zzzzz… Latin America share…. Zzzzz… 1 million hits a month… Someone wake me up when breakouts start?)

Breakout session area.

Welcome, even got the blue sbsc badge!

Usual Microsoft presentation, “It’s all in the powerpoint charts, baby!”

Pretty big crowd, I’d guess easilly over 300 people.

For my Florida people, our local folks are here. Jessica Emmons, our Partner Community Manager, and James Cuomo (aka Partner Technight Ranger, he’s the guy you call when you need help selling Office to a big account)

See, its just like you were here

It’s road trip time.

I’ve wrapped all the projects, all the to-do’s, all the “can you get this done” and for once I am hitting the road without a single backlog, on-hold, pending or waiting situation on both the home and the business fronts. Getting things in order, organizing, fixing past mistakes, just… cleaning the plate. And it feels phenomenal, what a way to close a quarter.

See you in Los Angeles or Denver. Really looking forward to getting the next two weeks done as fast as humanly possible!

I’ve had this post in the buffer for about two weeks; I wanted to let the euphoria of the social aspects of hanging out with my friends/peers/partners wash off so I can give you an objective view of just what went down, the good, the bad and the ugly. In terms of disclosure, my company Own Web Now Corp was a sponsor of the conference, I presented there and was involved in some pre-conference discussions but was not compensated for it. Nor for this review, for what its worth.

Define “Valuable.”

For me, every conference has a value that can be summed up in two ways – I either got a tangible income from it or I saved me time. If I got paid for speaking, if I sold a service, if I found a partner in XYZ city that gives me local presence with a client – money in the pocket. The flip side of that is time savings – I obviously do not work in the eBay PowerSeller / printer cartridge swapping business; I run a very high tech business and need to stay on top of the latest technology, something that requires classes, lectures, training, books, webcasts, virtual labs, executive luncheons – so if a conference gives me all that in one sitting it’s valuable. Get both of those components and it becomes spectacular!

Let’s face it, time is money. You’re either saving me money or you’re saving my time – or you’ll never see me or my wallet again. Pretty simple, right?

SBS Migration ITPRO Conference

I had no idea what to expect. When Jeff first pitched the idea to me he first told me about the SBS cruise ship followed by “I just want to throw a community conference, I don’t see at this as a commercial venture so this can happen without vendors.” Naturally, I expected to show up in New Orleans and watch a giant SBS group meeting.

It wasn’t that.

The conference happened over the course of two days, both during the weekend as to impact the work-week the least. I have to congratulate McLennan, SBS MVP for running the entire operation like a Swiss watch store clerk. Everything in terms of presenting and festivities was controlled down to the smallest details, felt like a wedding – for the first-time conference the execution and organization was almost perfect. That in itself is likely what made the show go on and make it a worth-while investment of my time.

Presentation content was fresh, for the most part. What was particularly interesting was the exchange that went on back and forth between the podium and the audience. It wasn’t just “You should do this” but every now and then the audience would ask “How? Who do you use? Who do you recommend? How do you do this? What type of hardware do you use this?” As we all know, the devil is in the details. The details were very worth-while. What made the entire trip worth it was the Sunday “Disaster Recovery” presentation marathon where over the course of the five hours or so you could see how people prepare and execute a disaster recovery plan. Not just disaster recovery as in “Too bad your stuff blew up, here is what you should have done” but more of the “Things to plan, things to do, things to follow up with!”

What made the conference absolutely phenomenal isn’t a single presentation, single person, single speach. It was the overall sense of what I need to focus on that was more clearly defined by being surrounded by people, presentations, lectures and idea exchange. How do I quantify that? On the flight back home I wrote five pages of talking points, agenda items and research leads that will affect our 3–5 year plan.

Size matters.

What put this conference over the top was the relative size. There were maybe 150 people in the audience, give or take depending on the session, time, day, vendors, family members, etc. What this basically means is that you can easily find the person that said something that interested you and you could go follow up with them. “Chad, what do you mean SharePoint 2.0 restoration is not bullet proof?” Got a business question? Technical question? Poll? Hardware recommendation?

This is what made it for me. We’re all geeks, we talk about geek things. We also talk about how those things make us successful, lets face it, everyone there was successful enough to take the Memorial Day weekend out of town – so on that logic alone it might follow that they might know more than your local “Can I have a tshirt” SBSer.

The Challenge.

Perhaps I’m alone at this, but I can deal with the intensity. Pack even more stuff in the space of two days, show me everything I may need to know about even if I don’t care. The stuff I care about I’ll follow up on and research, I’d rather be over informed than ignorant. The challenge of course becomes whether the people that are next to me, that are on my level, keep on coming back. If the people in the audience keep on having the same problems I have – staffing, training, billing, policy management, business goals and decisions – I’ll be back as well. This is a huge challenge for the conference organizer. On one hand, you risk the fact that the more resourceful/trained an individual becomes, the less they need you – plus you lose that sweet sponsor money because vendors don’t want to keep on selling stuff to the same audience that either already bought their product or isn’t going to buy it no matter what. On the other hand, if you focus the conference on entry level 100 slide-o-rama you lose your community following and people start ignoring you as irrelevant, or worse, a sellout vendor whore.

From what I know about Jeff, I know he will keep it close to the interests of the community and the leaders in this field. Why? That’s just the kind of a guy he is, and if you saw his closing speech you’d know that the driving value of t/his effort isn’t commercial. Jeff is a very good and smart guy, the way 1.0 went off I wouldn’t be surprised if the conference easily doubled to twice its size next year. Like SMBTN conference in the spring, this event was worth-while to a lot of us that have been in the business for years, that need some more sophisticated in-depth presentations but most of all need a good networking atmosphere so we can share and solve our issues with the help of our peers. That’s what SBS Migration conference did for me, and for OWN. Worth the money? Absolutely. Do I feel good about sponsoring it? Absolutely. Do I feel like I’ve mislead anyone by talking up the conference in my Vladcast podcasts? Not at all.

I’ll be back next year.

Watching the “news” pour in about Apple “innovations” like mobile phone, mobile Ajax, another  browser for Windows and more jaw-dropping technology that would amaze us all…. in 2002.

Welcome to 2007. This past year has been a long, ironic journey in which Apple claimed victory over Microsoft by selling shiny hardware to Microsoft users…… thats right, so they could run Vista on it! Way to get em boys!

But today Jobs takes the hordes onto another ironic journey, that of a “Developer” conference that prominently displays no developer content but only delayed vapor eyecandy.. and the only concrete solid piece of release – the new Apple store.

Not a whole lot of pictures today, as I’ve spent pretty much the entire day in NDA meetings. What I can say is that all the big SMB concerns I’ve been getting from you folks over the years today were asked/begged for in the focus groups – things like ability to send mail and stamp it with any proxyAddress attribute, separate and custom GAL without the HMS tools, mailing list support, etc. This is not to say that you’ll ever see those feature in any future version of Exchange, just to let you know that the concerns have been brought up and people designing future versions of Microsoft Exchange are aware of them. As for what they’ll actually be bringing in the next version of Exchange, or the upcoming SP1…

On the more public side of TechEd, Joe Willcox has an overview of this mornings Windows Server 2008 announcements. Frankly, the focus on Windows Server 2008 is enormous and the amount of problems it solves (by itself) is really amazing. There are so many labs, sessions and theatre presentations on it that will really make your head spin – not to mention that this is a Beta 3 product. They are even giving away free Microsoft Press Windows 2008 Server books in the infrastructure booth, stop by and ask for one!

In terms of TechEd value.. so far.. I don’t know what you make per hour but so far TechEd has been able to save me at least 2–3 weeks of research that I would have had to do on my own. In less than a day and a half. Not to mention the connections with the people that actually write the software so I can ping them for help when I run into issues, seeing the tips and tricks from the guys (and gals) that actually wrote it. Yes, you’ll eventually get all of this online, and you will maybe be able to figure it out on your own… but there is only 24 hours in a day and I don’t have only Windows Server 2008 to support. Optimization.

By the way, the most impressive product so far (sans Windows 2008 / Exchange, though I’m biased) at TechEd is LCS. Live Communications Server integrates all the conferencing, IM, video, audio, livemeeting, federation, policy control, etc that you can ever need. Sure, it costs an arm, leg, a firstborn, deed to the house and the national debt of Mexico…. but that is why we have things like BitTorrent!

(no, I’m not telling you to pirate things, it’s a joke. everyone wants to be an attorney these days)