Known as the biggest IT event
in Europe, French TechDays 2011 in Paris boasted an impressive
10,934 attendees, featuring 91 engaged Microsoft partners, 15 community booths
and roughly 300 sessions. The MVPs’ presence and influence was felt across the
entire event.
Sixty-seven MVPs delivered a
total of 63 of the 300 different sessions, while 31 MVPs were chosen to be the
ask the experts (ATE) on the various Microsoft product booths such as Azure,
Unified Communication, Office, TechNet, MSDN, Small Business, Microsoft
Learning (Certifications), Embedded, Windows Phone, SQL Server, Infra (Windows
Server, Virtualization and much more. These sessions were recorded and are
available here.
Proving the French community
team’s exceptional team work, the MVP
community program managers, user group leads and other community leads invested
countless hours to make sure key community influencers were involved in this
event. They identified numerous community leaders as session and workshops
speakers and worked to provide 17 top communities with community booths.
Community program manager
Martine Thiphaine recalls the participation of various communities in this
event:
“Year after year, MVPs and
communities are participating more and more in this unique event. These experts
are speakers, recognizable advisors and representatives of their community on
booths.
This is THE place where
you can find, once per year, the highest number of experts, per square meter,
ready to share their passion with any attendee! Please do not miss the
Microsoft TechDays 2012 event….!”
190 articles were
made available online in French Press and several MVPs were interviewed by the
ITPro.fr magazine. You can read some of the following MVPs interviews online:
Windows Expert-IT Pro MVP Patrice
Bonnefoy, SharePoint Workspace MVP Fabrice
Barbin, Exchange Server MVP Laurent
Teruin, Virtual Machine MVP, Cedric
Bravo and Lync MVP Pascal
Creusot.
During the evening of February 9th, roughly 200 community contributors were invited for a special Afterworks Evening event to meet each other, share ideas, and give feedback about the TechDays Event. Windows Expert-IT Pro MVP Laurent Miltgen-Delinchamp and Microsoft associate consultant for MCS, William Bories, organized this evening event through their network called Microsoft Communities Afterworks.
Windows Azure MVP Guillaume
Belmas expressed the importance of the French TechDays:
“The French TechDays is the place to be, meet and connect with all my Microsoft communities’ peers: MVP, MSP, User Groups and all other community actors. Having everyone in the same place at the same time is only possible thanks to the MS TechDays! These 3 days are always intense and it’s the perfect place to see the people you only talk to through email, IM, etc. On a business side, it’s also a really good occasion to meet and chat with former colleagues and customers.”
The French TechDays event was an incredible success and members of the community look forward
to Microsoft TechDays 2012!