Live! 360 conference recap - Part 1

So I took a little trip to Orlando last week. From Sunday afternoon through Friday, I was at Live! 360 – a 4-in-one conference. This was a mashup of tech and geek goodness. Live! 360 was comprised of Visual Studio Live!, SQL Server Live!, SharePoint Live!, and Modern Apps Live! …a conference pass to one of the conference was good for entrance to sessions of any of the conferences. To make the choices a bit more difficult, during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday there were typically 4 sessions being offered in each of the 4 tracks. Right. At any given time, one had to choose from among up to 16 different sessions.

Well, aside from the keynote addresses, I only attended sessions from the SharePoint track. Of all of those sessions, there was only one where I was a little disappointed by the speaker. I have at least one book written by this person, the book is quite good, and the speaker absolutely presented good information in the session. I simply thought the presentation was a little dry. To have a week full of grade 'A' sessions and one 'B' is remarkable. I've been to manyconferences during my 25 years in IT, focused on multiple technologies. There's typically been several sessions that I would grade lower than a 'B'.

The format was clever and I found it to be wonderful. Any who cared to join were invited to meet up Sunday evening. We paraded our massive group over to Margaritaville at Universal's City Walk for drinks and snacks, then each of the 4 tracks went to a different restaurant for dinner and conversation. Anyone could, of course, join any group.

I went with the SharePoint group to Hard Rock. There were maybe 20 of us there. A number of the folks who'd be presenting the sessions I'd attend over the coming days, several folks who'd been part of the community for some time, and then a few n00bs like me. What a brilliant idea to actively help folks make acquaintances before the conference proper began!

The format of the 5 days was a choice of all day sessions on Monday and Friday, an evening keynote on Monday, and then multiple 75 minute tracks throughout the day on Tue/ Wed/ Thu. And of course, plenty of options for meeting with folks in the evening.

Over the coming days I'll blog about some of the individual sessions, keynotes, and gatherings. It was a very well-done conference, I learned a ton, met a number of wonderful people, and had a blast!