For this last post, I really want to give you a lot of pictures so you see how much fun we've had this week. I am not able to go to TechEd today as I am flying out to Milan to start a European roadshow over there (darn :) ). Don't worry, we will continue to cover the IIS team at all these customer events. It is very important that our team stays connected with customers because their voice can easily be lost amid the crazy pace of work in Redmond. It's you guys that are actually out there using IIS everyday so it has to be you guys that help us determine what needs to be built into the product. So keep checking out these blogs, I will keep you up to date with the comings and goings of the team that hopefully you feel you're a part of.
So in these pics here we have Chris Adams doing round 2 of his IIS7 overview talk. I think by his body language alone, you can tell how much more comfortable he was this time around. The talk went very well. Chris was all over the stage, actively soliciting questions from the audience. His demos all worked and this time he had no hardware issues. The session still went long which wasn't good especially with the Attendee party starting right afterwards. But I think that with breadth of features he was explaining and demonstrating, it is very difficult to have extra time at the end especially when you are taking questions all throughout the session.
These two pictures were just classics. We were having fun at the IIS booth and the customers who came to see us seemed to be enjoying this. Everyone I spoke with was pretty excited about what we've put in IIS7 and it wasn't hard to get them to smile when you pull out the camera.
Below you will see Chris putting a tattoo on the hand of program manager, Alexis Eller while hanging out in the discussion area near the booth. In the background of this picture, you can see the entrance to one of the chalktalk theaters we presented in. At the time of this photo, I believe the guys from Microsoft.com operations were giving a talk on migrating to 64 bit. In general, these guys were very popular at TechEd so we will need to make them a bigger part of the show next year.
Ok, here are the pictures I promised from the Attendee party at Fenway park. I had never been to the historic ballpark so it was very cool to check it out. The band, Train, played for us but what I enjoyed more was a long conversation with a guy from the IIS Administrators group at Anheuser Busch. He told me his favorite part of the entire conference was learning about the IIS.net site. He was so pleased to have all the resources in one place and a way to communicate to the team about his issues directly.
I did ask him how we could have done better at TechEd. He said he would like to have more opportunities to hear from the guys from operations for Microsoft.com. Next year, we will have to expand their presence so everyone gets a chance to chat with Casey, Stucky, Jeff and George. He also thought we should have more talks on real-world deployment experiences on IIS6. IIS6 is a great web server and a lot of our customers are still migrating to it. It becomes a delicate balance between giving attendees useful tips and best practices on IIS6 that they can go back and use today and giving attendees good previews of IIS7 that help them get up to speed on the new technology. Next year, we will use IIS.net to get suggestions for talks from the community.
Finally, I asked him what he'd like to see in IIS. He was very interested in role based administration. IIS7 allows you to assign Windows/non-Windows users to sites as administrators with a degree of delegated management rights determined on a feature basis by the local administrator. This is a very powerful capability but it could be improved if we implementied role-based administration with users and groups as well as multiple feature delegation policies per site. Hmm, I wonder if this could be implemented as a module released out-of-band (hint, hint, BillS).
But in anycase, being able to have this conversation is why we do events like TechEd. We put in a ton of work for TechEd before and during this week. I am proud of our speakers, especially our MVPs, Ken Schaefer and Scott Forsyth, for working so hard to deliver great sessions. I am also very grateful for our staff who spent the week giving chalktalks and meeting with customers at the booth (thank you Robert, Andrew, Nitasha, Brett, Carlos, Tom and Jeff!). The IIS team will be back in force next year right before the release of Longhorn Server with IIS7 for server. We finished strong this year and have big plans for making the IIS presence even better next year!
A big "Thank you!" to all the customers who attended, all the IIS MVPs and Microsoft people who helped make this happen, and all of you who have been following IIS at TechEd via this blog.
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