Guest post by Abhishek Kant.
“As I’m part of the MVP
community, one great opportunity in Tech Ed is to meet the experts via the
Roundtable conferences. I was part of some high energy conversations with Jason
Zander , Yousef Khalidi, Rajiv Kumar (MS IDC Hyderabad) etc. Some of the information
you get via these conversations are under NDA ;). Also, during the
conversations with Jason and Yusuf, I realized how seriously Microsoft takes
the input from the community. “ -Anoop Madhusudhnan, MVP, Client App Development
Microsoft TechEd India 2011 was held from March 23 – 25, 2011 at Bangalore last month and was attended by 3276 attendees and about 160K online viewers.
All South Asia MVPs were invited to attend the TechEd and were offered free entry to the event (a significant cost saving). A total of 32 MVPs chose to attend the biggest technology conference in the region and 10 MVPs were speakers at the TechEd India 2011.
A number of MVP activities were conducted at TechEd India that included feedback sessions with executives, community networking party and “Meet the MVP” sessions.
Executive Roundtables
MVPs and community leaders were given exclusive privilege to attend intimate roundtables with Microsoft executives from the Redmond and IDC, Hyderabad. These 6 roundtables were an opportunity for the executives to talk about upcoming products and vision of specific technologies with the MVPs, and to take home feedback and community best practices.
The roundtables held included:
- Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft
- Brian Hall, General Manager, IE & Windows Live
- Bharat Shyam, General Manager, RD - Developer Experience, Microsoft
- Ramkumar Pichai, General Manager, Customer & Partner Experience, Microsoft
- Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Visual Studio, Microsoft
- Rajiv Kumar, General Manager, IDC-Hyderabad, Microsoft
Sitting in a roundtable with Yousef Khalidi ... Amazing Discussions... This makes #techedin worth it ... - Muqeet Khan, MVP, IIS
“Meet the MVPs” Session
On the first day at TechEd, MVPs and community leaders got together with Microsoft evangelists to talk about technical communities, best practices, issues they face, and the expected support from Microsoft. The session was attended by 45 people, including DPE evangelists, MVP Program team, and INETA folks.
- Evangelists: Ramprassana Chellamathu, Pinal Dave, Harish Vaidyanthan
- INETA: Sanjay Shetty
Community Networking Party
On the second day at TechEd India, MVPs and community leaders were invited to a community party jointly hosted by DPE, INETA, GITCA, and PASS.
Apart from a lot of networking, we saw sharing of best practices amongst various community leads.
This was my first in-person TechEd event and it was really marvelous. Your effort to coordinate with various MVP and Product Team Leads is highly appreciated. - Kamlesh Rao