After saying hooroo to Australia, author Orin Thomas moved on to New Zealand:
Orin here. TechEd New Zealand came as something of a relief after TechEd Australia. Not because there is anything inherently scary about TechEd Australia, but because that event was the first one where I gave my sessions to a large audience. Speaking to a couple of hundred people is a lot different to speaking to 20 or 30 and you find parts of your presentation that work with a small audience don’t translate that well to a large one. That I had survived with relatively good session ratings (last time I looked I was still hovering in the top 10 for presenter effectiveness) lifted a weight off my shoulders. As a speaker at TechEd you can become so focused on getting your presentations right that you don’t have time to get into the groove of the event itself. Speakers take evaluations very seriously. There is also a friendly competitiveness to seeing just whose sessions are ranked the highest. The better your evals, the more likely that you are to get an invitation to speak at TechEd next year.
The venue at TechEd New Zealand is smaller than the venue for TechEd Australia. The first photo shows the cavernous Arena 2 at the Gold Coast convention center; the second photo shows the more intimate Marlborough room at Auckland’s Sky City.
In the case of TechEd New Zealand, I knew my lines and my presentations well, so I could afford to take in a few more sessions that I had really wanted to see but had been unable to due to my focus on my own stuff in Australia. This included Jason Buffington’s great session on how to protect data hosted on Exchange and SQL Server using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.
I also attended some great sessions from the Scott and Andrew from the Exchange Team. They talked about Exchange Server 2010, spending a significant amount of time showing the care and attention necessary to properly manipulate mail tips so that they can be used to their full effectiveness.
Although both events are great and it is a privilege to present, another advantage that the NZ event has is that with a smaller number of speakers, there is greater opportunity to mingle with other speakers. At TechEd in Australia you can feel a little lost in the crowd. At the Australian event you might not even run into another speaker, in NZ it can be difficult to get away from them (just ask Corneliu, Vittorio, Scott, Andrew and Jason ;-).
One of the great things of being a regular author at Microsoft Press is that it opens doors like having the ability to present at TechEd. For all the nerves involved in getting your presentation just right, there is an awesome sense of immediate accomplishment when you pull off a great session. I hope to speak at many more TechEds over the coming years, and I hope to see you one day as a member of the audience in one of my sessions.