Last week I was invited to TechEdZA the Microsoft Conference held in Durban at the ICC.
Covering all things tech from laptops to mobile phones to dev to apps and all things in between.
With over 2000 people reported to be in attendance this was indeed a massive conference.
I started off attending the session with @SimonStewart and what an interesting session it was.
He gave us some wonderful tips:
- He encouraged people at the conference to meet other people.
- Get out there and introduce yourself and chat to others.
- He encouraged companies to have in-house suggestion systems.
- How much time in a day can you spend on being productive?
- He recommended you send weekly progress emails to clients.
- By the way he also gave away lots of swag including Planning Poker Cards.
Next we heard from Gary Hope and Laura Kotlinksi about Data Warehouses.
These were the highlights:
- Business is moving online
- Social Media is teaching people to collaborate and learn online
- Look out for Zettabytes. Already the NSA is reportedly getting a data warehouse that will accommodate 4 Zettabytes of Data. By the way, that's a lot of data
- 1 Zettabyte = 1000 Petabytes
- 1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes
Next up we heard from Rudi Grobler all about Apps. These were his tips:
- Use programs like Bug Sense and Little Watson to debug your apps
- Test your apps with real world data and monitor your heavy objects
- A useful twitter account to follow is @msdevsa
On the next day we heard about Social Collaboration from @GarthLuke
His highlights included:
- Find people with common interests
- Social Media allows your company to learn faster than others
- Remember in this day and age everyone has their own device now
- Location does not matter, you can work anywhere.
In the Consumerisation of IT session we heard the following:
- Microsoft manages over 290 000 devices in SA
- Interesting point - Microsoft does not stop its workers from using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. They believe it is good for business. It has huge business value for them.
You can find more highlights here:
Finally for those of you that attended this conference you will recognize this.
The ICC is big and it is a long walk from one side to the other.
Sometimes you just had to sit on the floor and chill:
Look out for Part 2 of this article later in the week.
Article and Images by Fred Felton (@fredfelton)
Fred Felton was a guest of Microsoft South Africa.
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