Differences between 2 different Tech*Ed’s this year

Well, this is the first year that Microsoft split up the annual Tech*Ed conference in order to appeal to 2 separate audiences … developers and IT Professionals.  Last week was the part of the conference that was targetting developers, and this is the week targetting IT Pros.

I’ve started to notice quite a difference in the level of expertise in the community lounges/areas this year.  I’ve asked several “experts” recommendations on things like “How can we address encryption concerns with data at rest while depending heavily on Sharepoint?”  I got answers like … “Sharepoint just uses whatever SQL Server supports, so maybe you should ask someone at the SQL Server area”.  When I explained that Sharepoint did not even support SQL Server 2005’s database encryption, the Sharepoint guy said “Oh, really, uh, I guess that is a Sharepoint issue, huh.”  Thanks for the help, dolt.

I also noticed that there are NO sessions that center/focus on Visual Studio.  Hmmm, I guess that makes sense – it’s a development tool, not an IT Pro tool.  But, I really got value out of much of that stuff last year.

It seems a lot clearer that a lot of material (and expertise) was pulled from the IT Pro part of Tech*Ed this year.