REDMOND, Wash., April 9, 2002 — The year was 1993. Windows 3.1 was Microsoft’s flagship operating system. DOS-based software was outselling Windows software, but sales of Microsoft’s word-processing and spreadsheet applications for Windows had grown 95 percent in the prior year. A new product for developers, called Microsoft Visual Basic, had just shipped the year before; the concept of a graphical user interface was still relatively novel. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy.
It was the first year of Tech
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Ed, Microsoft’s annual conference devoted to providing information and training to corporate developers and IT personnel. As Tech
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Ed 2002 opens today for five days in New Orleans, Press Pass marks the 10th-year anniversary of the conference with a look back at how the evolution of the conference has mirrored both the IT industry’s growth and that of Microsoft as a company. The conference is held each year at one site in the U.S., and also at a growing number of sites around the world — a total of 12 in 2002 — ranging from Barcelona to Beijing.
The first Tech
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Ed was held in Orlando, Fla. Its attendance of 3,000 proved to be a surprise to organizers. “It turned out to be way more popular than what we anticipated — the hotel wasn’t big enough for the number of people who showed up,” recalls Dee Dee Walsh, Microsoft’s director of business development for the Developer Tools Division. “Who knew? Not only did the show sell out, but people showed up from around the world who hadn’t even registered. It was phenomenally successful.”
Which isn’t to say it was particularly well organized. “The first Tech
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Ed was seat of your pants — it was almost primitive compared to what we do now,” Walsh says. “I remember I got off my flight, and I wasn’t supposed to be involved in registration, but I got enlisted immediately to help because so many people showed up.”
The conference was planned to be a much smaller affair. “We even threw a party for all attendees,” Walsh says. “It was the first ‘Geekfest’ we ever threw, out by the hotel pool.”
Tech
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Ed has grown up. At Tech
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Ed 2002, 75,000 attendees are expected at conferences in all 12 venues worldwide. It has gone from a handful of breakout sessions to dozens of them, and from about 10 exhibitors to hundreds. The ranks of IT professionals and developers attending the U.S. conference regularly top 7,000, with Europe close behind. In China this year, 5,000 are expected.
As Microsoft Evolved, so Has Tech
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Ed
Tech
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Ed’s content over the years has mirrored changes at Microsoft. “Microsoft is continuously evolving its offerings to address the needs of our customers. Likewise, we adapt the focus of Tech
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Ed to deliver the latest and most relevant information to our attendees,” says Craig Jaris, lead product manager of Microsoft’s Enterprise Marketing Group. Since 1996, Jaris has orchestrated the technical agenda for Tech
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Ed — the technical tracks, breakout sessions and hands-on labs.
“Both the products and Tech
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Ed have matured,” Jaris says. “If you look back at the early 1990s, SQL Server was still early in stages of its development and our messaging product was Mail 3.2, which was prior to beginning our work on Exchange. As those products have grown up, and Microsoft as a company has become a very significant player in the enterprise, the conference has followed that same path.”
Microsoft’s evolution to a provider of mission-critical enterprise software and solutions has been mirrored at Tech
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Ed by a change in the focus of the content. “Initially, I think we did a great job of coming in and saying, here’s product ‘X,’ and here’s how to use that product more effectively,” Jaris says. “Today, we’re approaching it much more from the customer point of view. We recognize, for instance, that security is a huge concern for corporations. So now, we’ll present the process you can walk through to establish a more secure infrastructure as well as how you write your code to be more secure.”
Travis McGee, a developer with LocatePlus.com, a database company in Beverly, Mass., has attended every U.S. Tech
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Ed since the beginning. He’s noticed this evolution as well. “In the old days, sessions used to be more desktop oriented, with topics like ‘how to do macro tricks with Word,'” McGee says. “Over the years Microsoft has been getting better and better on the enterprise and corporate server side of things. It’s more satisfying to see that, because you can learn the end-user tools and developer tools by yourself, but there are lots of networking issues where it is much more useful to attend a session,” he explains.
In addition to mirroring Microsoft’s change, Tech
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Ed’s content has tracked broad changes in technology over the last decade. “We’ve made the shift to focusing on Web services and how they empower customers and partners to develop powerful Microsoft .NET applications,” Jaris says. “When I first became involved with Tech
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Ed, Visual Studio was the hot new topic. For me personally, we’ve come full circle, in that this year Microsoft recently launched Visual Studio .NET. We’ve taken that family of products to a completely different level, enabling the easy development of Web-services-based applications.” Creating Web-enabled solutions based on Microsoft technologies has moved to the forefront at the conference in a very orchestrated way in the last three or four years, Jaris adds.
The push to the Web first made itself strongly felt at Tech
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Ed in 1998, when Microsoft put on a second conference, called Web Tech
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Ed, in Palm Springs, Calif. “That really kicked off our first major push for ASP development for the corporate audience, Internet Explorer, D-HTML, and Internet Information Server,” Jaris recalls. This material was then slipstreamed into other TechEd events. “That was one of the most well-received conferences we’ve done.” And in 1999, in Dallas, there was a big push at Tech
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Ed to present about Windows DNA architecture.
Starting last year, Tech
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Ed focused largely on Microsoft’s .NET vision, including the .NET Enterprise Servers and Visual Studio .NET, which was previewed last year and launched this year. “We’re seeing a lot of excitement out there for this year’s conference,” Jaris says. “Customers realize that the best tools and infrastructure required to effectively develop, deploy and manage Web services are real today and available through the Microsoft offerings.”
Along with the growth around Web services, there has also been significant interest in the mobility space. “Mobile devices in conjunction with Web services offer very complementary technologies for enabling the true mobility experience,” Jaris says. “Looking at the variety of devices and the ‘always accessible’ information requirements from businesses and consumers, we’re providing the latest information on how developers can easily access this functionality using Microsoft tools and applications. Most of our sessions are demonstrating the most efficient way to program for a variety of clients, including handhelds, desktops, laptops, Pocket PCs, WAP-enabled phones, you name it.” This trend was boosted in 2001 with the advent of Windows XP and the current generation of the Pocket PC.
Even the conference logistics themselves have mirrored the push towards mobility and Web services. “Up to Tech
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Ed 2000, we had a communications network deployed so people could walk up to a kiosk and surf the Web or do e-mail during session breaks,” Jaris says. “Beginning last year, we implemented a wireless network at the conference to provide real-time information to our attendees as well as connectivity to the rest of the world.”
Taking advantage of .NET and Web services, the site has been re-architected from the ground up to provide an even richer experience for attendees. The CommNet Web application is written entirely in managed code containing a business logic tier written in the programming language C# (pronounced “C-sharp”), a tools class written in C#, a data class written in C#, an ASP.net Web tier written in Visual Basic.NET, a Web service for reporting and a Web service for electronic communications with the company that handles attendee-registration processing. The CommNet site allows all conference participants to have the latest information regarding sessions, scheduling, previewing presentations and sample code, as well as notification of last minute session changes. “We’re seeing a huge increase in people bringing their own devices with wireless cards. This system is going to help them take that experience a lot further,” Jaris says.
Developer Focus Constant
While many things about the conference have changed over the years, the goals have remained constant from the beginning, Walsh explains. “At highest level, the goal of Tech
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Ed has always been to help our customers be successful by giving them the information they need to build world-class robust systems with our software,” she says. “Ten years ago, we had no way to reach corporate-developer customers. So the idea of Tech
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Ed was born, where developers could get hands-on education with Microsoft products.”
At Tech
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Ed, people using Microsoft products could speak directly with the people making decisions about how the software is built. There have been many opportunities for this, with breakout sessions on infrastructure-level topics and intensive product sessions. Keynotes from major Microsoft figures and VIP guest speakers have usually been followed by question-and-answer sessions, and the speakers have made themselves available afterwards. “It’s been a two-way street,” Walsh says. “Developers get to understand what we’re thinking and how to better use our software, and we get first hand feedback on our software to make it better. We get to really understand what developers are doing.”
McGee the Massachusetts-based developer, keeps coming back because he finds Tech
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Ed a good investment. “The most valuable aspect has been the chance to talk to the product teams one on one, the insiders who write the code, versus the field people. You get a feeling for the issues they’ve faced throughout development, and you become more comfortable with the product. I remember every single conversation I’ve had with Microsoft-inside developers; they never go away, they stick with you.”
For McGee, the highlight has always been when Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer takes the stage. “There’s nothing like seeing them in person,” he says. “Whenever Bill Gates is up there, or going up to Steve Ballmer and shaking his hand — these are big things for me.”
Michael Stinson, who has attended Tech
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Ed conferences for nine years, finds the connections he’s made with other developers invaluable. “The funniest thing at Tech
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Ed to me is when they hand out backpacks, and the city then has 10,000 look-alikes with backpacks,” he said. “It makes it easy to make contact and discuss various topics to find out what the other backpackers are doing.”
McGee has always enjoyed the more playful side of Tech
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Ed. “Microsoft knows how to entertain developers,” McGee says. One year he even took along his bongo drum to New Orleans for a jam session, where he got up onstage and played with other developers.
To Microsoft’s Walsh, TechEd always reflects the best part of Microsoft, customer focus. “It’s like this little gem that Microsoft has always recognized as powerful and valuable to us,” she says. “That’s why we’ve kept it over the years.”