Our trip began well enough and the only things that bothered me revolved around "sticker shock". The conference was fine, but not very enjoyable. Most everything covered, I already knew. Even a few of the speakers brought that up in conversations when I mentioned that I didn't learn much and they were surprised that I had expected to do so. Interesting…
The problem with the conference was that it was TOO frackin big. There were 7600+ attendees, 200+ Microsoft Employees, 120 speakers, and 160 sponsors/exhibitors who brought out their "A Teams" for the event. (This means "booth babes" were more than abundant.) This amount of people meant that everything was run like a poorly managed Army maneuver. Led to meals like cattle and the break-out sessions were filled with 2-400 people each so there was no room for anything but lectures.
This also meant that there was no real chance to do any real social networking since everyone was trying to get time with all the "rockstars" or make that "special" business connection. So, no real time with my close colleagues – even if one attended the unofficial social gatherings.
As for the officially sponsored social gatherings – that's where things started to go wrong for us.
By Tuesday, Trudy and I had toured Vegas, eaten at the Top of the World, gone from New York to Paris to Venice to Rome. We'd seen sharks, the Titanic, and Phantom of the Opera (The best 95 minutes of the week, btw). Tuesday evening was supposed to be a 80's themed beach party with Huey Lewis and the News. I had arranged with one of the event sponsors, KnowledgeLake, to get Trudy and my co-worker's new bride, Linda, into the party even though they were not conference attendees. They really want my business so they agreed to give them VIP passes. We were told these would get them into the party and also into a private cabana for a catered party. Sounded good to me.
However, the Mandalay Bay staff proved that all the hunches, misgivings, and little signs we had been noticing all week to this point were well founded. The staff did know about the VIP passes, but they weren't letting anyone with them into the party – unless they had also paid $150 for a "Guest Pass". I did phone my contact at KnowledgeLake and he offered to come escort us through – but that ended up taking so long that Trudy and I got tired of the dirty looks we were getting from the MB staff and left. Apparently we weren't the only ones treated like crap that night – as some of the people who HAD paid the extra money to get in were turned away due to the party being "at fire code capacity". Turns out that the party was sold out (which I knew) but they had not actually be checking to see who signed up or bought the tickets, they were just letting any conference attendee into the party – until they were getting in trouble for that fire code thing.
Unfortunately, this made us start really noticing just how much the Mandalay Bay sucked. I've stayed in better Motel 6's. I put our hotel experience in another post.
Back to the conference, I did win a Flip Cam and got lots of swag. I saw as many presentations as I could and was glad I could look at the videos as there were TOO many sessions to take them all.
As for our trip as a whole, we basically enjoyed the week and had a nice time. But this was mainly due to having someone to share the experience with and not the conference or the hotel. Next conference I won't be taking Trudy and she agrees that it was pretty boring for her during the day unless she wanted to spend mucho dinero.
I look forward to the next, hopefully smaller, SharePoint event. I'll probably talk your ear off then.