Introduction

I am off to Microsoft Ignite 2017.  This is an annual technical conference hosted by Microsoft.  When I last went this conference was called TechEd.  TechEd first started back in 1993 in Orlando and has been run every year in a different location up until 2014 in Houston Texas, after that it was re-branded as Ignite.  In the past they used to have a separate Exchange conference which I attended in the US before they merged that into TechEd and I have also been to TechEd in Barcelona and Amsterdam. This year TechEd has gone back to its roots and is hosted in Orlando.

They usually attract around 20,000 people and over 5 days and hosts over 700 technical sessions along with a large vendor expo.  The sessions are divided into different technology streams and targeted at different professions such as technical, management, devs, sales etc.  Obviously there is no way you are going to get around all 700 sessions so they release a schedule before the event where you can pick and choose the sessions that will be of interest.

The session usually last from around 30-90 minutes and are typically run either by Microsoft employees, customers that have gone through a particular journey or partners. In the past where things have been run by partners there is very little sales push and more focus on technology which is good as some of the free one day sessions run by partners over here can turn into just sales pushes.

At the start of the conference there is a keynote speech ,  I had the pleasure of seeing Ballmer bounce onto the stage of one of the previous sessions, this time I would expect Nadella to be a little more subdued.

I'll keep the blog updated as to what I am up to in and out of the conference.