There have been recent discussions surrounding the relevance and structure of Tech.Ed Australia and whether it is possibly losing touch with the typical aussie tech-head.  The release of the surprising figures of the breakdown of the attendees for this year’s event prompted some questions and guessing as to why so few developers are seeing the value of attending.  Personally I still see great value in Tech.Ed in its current form, but like some people I see it primarily as a networking event, rather than an education one.  So the following items are some ways I think Tech.Ed Australia could be even better and hopefully grow into something far, far bigger in the years to come.

1. 3rd party content:
   Very few of us work in a complete “Microsoft Shop”. Most of us have to deal with integration issues and work to ensure the systems we use provide as much benefit to the business as possible. So if you’re organisation already has a large investment in the Oracle database platform for example you want to know how to leverage that using Microsoft technologies. Microsoft have realised this before with releases of free kits such as “SQL Server for the Oracle customer” that outline ways in which various MS products can enhance existing 3rd party solutions.  Tech.Ed in the US seems to recognise this too, with companies like Oracle becoming Gold sponsors and have sessions on their MS-related technologies.  Session on how to best intergrate your linux servers into your Active Directory would surely be pretty valuable too.  So why don’t we see more 3rd party content at Tech.Ed Australia?
2. End-to-End solutions sessions:
   I like that this year there is a 2-part ASP.NET session with Scott Gutherie around building an ASP.NET 2.0 application from start to finish using the best practices and advice. I think there should be more of these style of sessions. Perhaps even extend the Hands-on-Labs into “Solution Assistance Labs” where you can bring along your own code or server configuration on a notebook/PC and then work with the experts and peers to solve your real-world issues.
3. Vertical industry content streams:
   Microsoft host seminars throughout the year focussed on particular vertical industry sectors like Health, Government or Education and pitch their products in ways that will appeal to people in these groups. Why not extend that to Tech.Ed in some way? As well as the technology tracks there could be cross section industry sector “virtual” tracks that highlight sessions from the technical tracks that would appeal to certain vertical groups. You could even include some specific sessions to kick-off and round-up these virtual tracks to help attendees bring it all together in a valuable way for their particular industry. Would probably provide a nice way to market the event to those sectors too.
4. Connectivity:
   I expect an event of the scale of Tech.Ed by a company such as Microsoft to serve as a demonstration of how technology can be used in all the various wonderful ways we so often see and read about.  One of the simplest examples of a great technology is wireless networking coupled with portable devices whether they be notebooks, tablets, PDA’s or smartphones.  So why was last year’s wireless offering one Telstra stand and 1 hour of free internet access?  The access to scores of PCs setup for the event is fantastic for checking the agenda and your e-mail between sessions, but they go no way to keeping us connected during the majority of the event spent in sessions.  I’d like to see the LAN roll-out expanded with Wi-Fi access and the deployment of mobile-friendly applications for managing one’s attendance of the event, including session timetables, exhibitor hall details, event updates (competition drawings, scratchings, special offers, etc.) and maybe even some mobile-based spot prize competitions.  Let’s see this technology in action!
5. Hardware advice & displays:
   There have been some posts of late on the Stanski list regarding the best hardware tips for getting VS2005 to run fast and I can recall seeing similar threads in the past relating to how to get the best performance out of one’s development environment. How cool would it be if at Tech.Ed you could sample the latest and greatest rigs with all the MS dev tools installed to see how they perform and compare which particular options make the biggest difference: RAID-0 disk, huge RAM, RAMDISK swap files, dual-cores, etc. I’m really looking forward to seeing Dave’s DevGarten this year but I think this idea could be expanding into something really valuable.
6. The Grand Vision:
   The grand vision of a hugely connected society where all conceivable services are connected and understand each other is something I haven’t seen mentioned much by Microsoft of late. I recall some cool demo videos years ago when .NET was first released demonstrating the potential of this technology if properly applied in society and I liked what I saw. Why isn’t Tech.Ed the place where Microsoft remind us of this vision? Even better, why isn’t it the place where Microsoft demonstrate this vision by rolling out wireless applications to serve an attendees every need. I want to be able to order a coffee on my smartphone while still in session and then wander out afterwards and pick it up from the coffee dude, and then get an alert telling me that the podcast of the conflicting session I was interested in is now available for me to listen to while I go check my e-mail. I’m sure we could all think of really cool ways in which the vision could be demonstrated.