Tuesday, 15 August 2006 10:50 AM
geoffa
Behind The Scenes At TechEd #9 - Anna Liu
For this Behind the Scenes, I'm talking to Anna Liu. Anna is organising the Ask The Experts dinner.
- Who are you, and what do you do when you aren't doing things for TechEd?
I’m Anna Liu, Architect Advisor at Microsoft Australia, based in Sydney. I’m the new girl in Frank Arrigo’s team You can find my blog here.
- What exactly is the Ask the Experts session? What's the purpose of it?
The Ask the Experts Evening is about enabling communication between TechEd attendees and TechEd speakers. I want to make sure the attendees have the opportunity to ask the hard questions that don’t typically get answered in the TechEd breakout sessions, and that everyone has the opportunity to provide the experts (especially those with the Product responsibility) candid feedback on the technologies.
- In the past, it's generally just been an informal gathering combined with dinner where attendees can find themselves an 'expert' and have a chat. Are you keeping it the same this year or trying to shake it up a bit?
I'm definitely going to shake it up this year! We'll be kick-starting the Ask The Expert evening with 3 parallel panel sessions at the 3 major cabana locations. The theme is 'Ask the Hard Questions', focusing around the 3 key technical audience interests of Security, IT Pro and Developer. There will also be 30 roundtables grouped under the 10 TechEd session tracks, scattered around the whole of the TechEd Halls, so if you want the more intimate/1-1:few interaction with a TechEd speaker, you can still do so at the roundtables.
- So who are your experts this year? What are they experts in?
Some of the expert panellists will include: Brian Puhl (Windows Infrastructure), Andrew McMurray (Ops/MOM), Scott Guthrie (Developers), Eric Lee (TFS), Kai Axford (Security) - and in addition to our US visitors, we'll also have many local experts present at the Ask the Expert Evening, both Microsoft employees as well as our most valued professionals from the community.
- What if I want to talk to a few different experts but I run out of time at the actual event. Are they going to be hanging around for a few days so I can convieniently bump into them and hit them up for advice?
Yes you sure can! All speakers will be wearing the Speaker shirts throughout the event, so please feel free to chat to them in the corridors, tea breaks, wherever! We’re all very keen to meet and chat to as many people as we can. There are also 2 other structured ways for such interactions: The Dev Garten – this area is specially designed for all developers to gather in the same place, and is available throughout the whole TechEd event. At the Dev Garten, there is a formal roster of developer experts, so you can always find a few gurus to chat to/hack code with at the DevGarten. Also, the Microsoft Technology Showcase is another hub that will have continuous cabana/demo/showcase running throughout the entire conference. You can always go to the Microsoft Technology showcase area to meet more experts.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm really looking forward to this - it's probably one of my biggest reasons for coming to TechEd myself. I hope you all enjoy it too :)