SharePoint Conference Thank You

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What an amazing SharePoint Conference we had last week.  I wanted to take a minute to say, “THANK YOU,” to all of you.  The SharePoint Partner ecosystem is ROCKING, and notice was served last week in a big way. 

The energy that was in and around the partner exhibit hall on Sunday night was incredible.  The flow of folks never seemed to die down, throughout the entire 3 hours!  And the partners were ready to work!  I received so many comments from partners that they couldn’t believe how educated and qualified the attendees were, and how many real leads resulted from their booth at the conference. 

And, the ultimate closing hand was the fact that so many of the partners on the floor were already demoing their products on SharePoint 2010 beta 1.  That was very cool to see. 

Thank you so very much for the time and energy that you have invested in showing how strong the SharePoint partner ecosystem really is.  I feel that there is still a long way to go, in illustrating how much potential there is for partners in and around SharePoint, but it will happen. 

As always, please feel free to let me know how your experience went, what went well, and what could be improved on for the next time.  I’ve included some facts about the show and about two launched/updated SharePoint-related websites at the bottom of this email.

Key Statistics from the SharePoint Conference 2009

  • 7400+ Attendees (94% growth over last SharePoint Conference!)
  • Sold Out 2 weeks before the show
  • 165 Partners Sponsoring and Exhibiting
  • 18 Customers Presenting
  • 279 Speakers
  • 240 Sessions (300+ hours of content)
    • (For comparison, we usually create 30-40 hours of new content for the typical Tech-Ed conference.)
  • 45 Hands-on Labs – 5,500 labs were executed during 3.5 days. 
    • (Tech-Ed usually sees about 3,000 labs executed)
  • Largest Beach Party Ever at the Mandalay Bay (80’s theme, Huey Lewis and the News!)
  • MySPC: 5000 profiles filled out, 1500 profile photos uploaded
  • A SharePoint Marriage (SPJeff – https://www.spjeff.com to his wife Emily.)
  • We had over 27,000 people watch the keynotes lives the morning of the conference and you can view the keynotes on-demand here –

On top of all that, the SharePoint website was updated to include more SharePoint 2010 content and now runs on SharePoint 2010 Beta 1!  Check it out at SharePoint2010.Microsoft.com.  The top download on the SharePoint website is the Office and SharePoint Better Together whitepaper.

Another interesting website also went live – the “Because it’s Everybody’s Business” website.  Check it out.

The customers were amazing at the SharePoint Conference.  The Energy was ELECTRIC! 

The Presenters did such an incredible job.  So much SharePoint 2010 content to absorb and ingest…  it’s going to take a while!

But, I must say thank the most to the Partners.  What an incredible showing.  There is a lot of hard work being put in, all around the SharePoint universe, and partners are often the icebreakers that are carrying SharePoint into customers, industries, workloads and application types that SharePoint didnm’t used to be considered for. 

Thanks.

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