XaocCPS July 5, 2011 at 12:10

TechEd Conferences Brand History

Many IT professionals are familiar with the TechEd brand . TechEd are world-famous conferences hosted by Microsoft around the world. Conferences under the TechEd brand gather thousands of managers and executives, programmers and IT experts, professionals in their field and offer them dozens or even hundreds of technical reports on the days of the conferences.

This article will briefly tell the story of TechEd as a brand and talk about the most interesting moments of conferences under this name.

Start

It all started back in 1993 by IT standards, when the first conference under the name TechEd took place in Orlando, Florida, USA. This year, Microsoft introduced its new brainchild to the conference participants - the Windows 3.1 operating system, which later became very popular. In addition, the key topic remained the MS DOS operating system, which at that time was at the peak of popularity. Of the interesting products of that period, we can distinguish Microsoft Visual Basic, which Microsoft introduced shortly before the conference. Later, Visual Basic will also be a huge success.

The first TechEd started very seriously - it was visited by 3,000 technical experts, which was a surprise even for the organizers. A dedicated hotel could barely cope with the influx of participants. Many experts came even without prior registration, because it quickly ended. In general, the first TechEd was a resounding success.

The next two conferences of 1994 and 1995 were held in New Orleans, USA and secured the successful start of a new event. In 1994, the company already talked about its new Windows project “Chicago” (future Windows 95), in addition to the topics: Windows NT, Access, FoxPro, VBA, Visual C ++, OLE, MAPI, SQL Server and other technologies. In 1995, the conference broke all records by offering developers more than 400 reports in one event. The 1995 TechEd lasted five days.

In 1996, the TechEd conference was held in Los Angeles, gathering already 7,000 participants. This event was opened by Bill Gates himself, then chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Microsoft. Gates' plenary talk was about the Internet and how it is integrated into Windows and Windows NT operating systems. Another major topic of the conference was ActiveX technology.

1997 was an important year in the history of TechEd. Firstly, the conference was held again in Orlando and was held from May 5 to 9, gathering a record 9,000 participants. And secondly, the conference took a new step in development - for the first time a European version of the conference was organized under the name TechEd EMEA. This event took place in Nice, France. It was attended by 3,700 people. Organized live conference participants were greeted by Bill Gates.

Since 1998, at TechEd conferences, Microsoft began to actively promote Internet technologies: development on ASP, Internet Explorer, DHTML and the IIS server. In 1999, Windows DNA technology was introduced at TechEd, which later transformed into the .NET platform.

In 2001, the central topic for discussion at the TechEd conference was the .NET platform, including the server side, the new C # programming language, and Visual Studio.NET, a new generation of development tools.

In 2002, the TechEd North America conference was held in New Orleans in April. This was the tenth anniversary TechEd conference. Eric Radder made a plenary report at the conference this year , who spoke about a new product of Visual Studio.NET, launched a little earlier in 2002.

At a conference in Dallas in 2003, a new Windows Storage Server 2003 product was announced, discussing a new version of SQL Server, codenamed Yukon, and a second version of the .NET Framework.

2004 was the year of discussion for the next generation of Windows, codenamed Longhorn.

The 2008 TechEd, which was already held under the TechEd North America brand, was remembered by a historical event - the last speech by Bill Gates on behalf of Microsoft, who spoke about the company's plans to develop data centers and the new Windows 7 operating system.

Since 2008, thanks to Channel9 , everyone has the opportunity to watch video reports of TechEd conferences online. At http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd video reports are available from the following TechEd conferences:

The next TechEd North America 2012 conference will be held in June 2012 in Orlando, USA.

Our days

Today's central TechEd North America is a gigantic event gathering thousands of participants. The TechEd NA 2011 conference brought together 10,000 professionals from 84 countries from around the world to listen to more than 500 technical sessions and reports and participate in 250 laboratory works.

Interesting announcements of some of the latest TechEd events:

TechEd Europe 2009 - a new generation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 has been released, a preliminary version of SQL Server 2008 R2 has become available
TechEd North America 2010 - pre-release version of Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Exchange Server 2010 SP1, announcements of the development of Windows Azure, details of Communications Server “14” are revealed.
TechEd Europe 2010 - the launch of the Cloud Power initiative was announced , together with Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC, the Hyper-V Cloud project was launched, the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track was launched, and a preliminary version of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 became available;
TechEd North America 2011 - for the first time, the details of the new version of Visual Studio, which will replace the 2010 version, were announced, numerous extensions to the cloud services of Windows Azure were announced, announcements about the release dates were made, and preliminary versions of new versions of products became available: SQL Server Denali, WP7, Hyper- V, System Center 2012.

Regional Conferences

TechEd EMEA / Europe

Since 1997, holding a conference of the European version of TechEd EMEA has become almost annual. Conferences were held in 1998 (Nice), 1999 and 2000 (Amsterdam), 2003 (Barcelona), 2004 and 2005 (Amsterdam), 2006-2008 (Barcelona) and in 2009 and 2010 TechEd EMEA were held in Berlin.

In 2011, the TechEd Europe conference took a break in order to return in 2012. From June 25 to 29, the next TechEd Europe 2012 will be held in Amsterdam .

In 2003, TechEd took another step and the conference expanded significantly, bringing new countries to a new continent. This time Australia, India and Israel received their TechEd.

TechEd Australia, TechEd New Zealand

The Australian version of the largest conference for IT professionals began its history in 2003 in Brisburn, Australia. After that, the annual Australian versions of TechEd were held in the cities of Canberra (2004), Gold Coast (2005, 2007, 2009, 2010) and Sydney (2006, 2008).

Together with the Australian conference, a conference was held annually in neighboring New Zealand. TechEd New Zealand events almost always took place in Auckland, New Zealand. At the 2010 TechEd New Zealand Conference, dozens of papers were presented.

At the end of August 2011 the next TechEd New Zealand 2011 will be held , and at the beginning of September TechEd Australia 2011 .

TechEd India

The TechEd India Conference began its history in 2003. Since then, the conference has been held annually, with the exception in 2008, when the conference was not held.

In 2009, Steve Ballmer spoke at TechEd India and it was Ballmer's first speech at a TechEd regional conference outside the United States. In 2009, the conference offered visitors 28 technical tracks with 112 reports and 24 laboratory works.

The last Indian event was held in March 2011 in Bangalore, India.

TechEd Israel

The first TechEd Israel conference held in 2003 in the city of Eilat gathered 1,500 people. The TechEd Israel 2010 conference was held in November 2010 and gathered more than 3,000 people, the main topics of the conference were Office 365, Lync, and SharePoint 2010 technologies.

In 2005, the TechEd conference once again increased its geographical presence - the African version of TechEd Africa was launched.

TechEd Africa

The TechEd Africa conference (called TechEd South Africa until 2007) became the next international analogue of the original TechEd, which has recently been called TechEd North America. The first African TechEd was held in 2005 in the city of Sun City, South Africa. In the following 2006 and 2007, the conference was held in Sun City, but from 2008 to 2010, the venue of TechEd Africa was changed to Durban, South Africa.

From October 17 to 20, 2011 , TechEd Africa 2011 will reopen its doors in Durban.

TechEd Middle East

These two conferences are the newest of the TechEd brand conferences. First, in March 2010, in the city of Dubai, the UAE, the TechEd Middle East Conference was held, and then in September 2010, the South American TechEd Latin America was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Conference TechEd Middle East 2011 was held in March 2011 in Dubai.

The story of TechEd does not end there. In 2011, the brand will be expanded again. A new conference under the name TechEd Russia will enter the arena of the world's largest events for IT professionals.

More TechEd

In addition to these conferences, there are even more geographical locations in the TechEd brand world. This is TechEd China, TechEd Japan, TechEd Brasil (aka TechEd Latina America). Almost the whole world is covered by the TechEd conference, the events of which annually bring together tens of thousands of specialists around the world.

And I am very pleased that in 2011 this large family of conferences will be replenished with another country (and in fact a whole region) - Russia.

TechEd Russia

On November 9-10, 2011, Moscow will host the first international Tech ∙ Ed Russia 2011 conference . The conference will bring together about 3,000 professionals in the field of information technology from Russia and the CIS countries.

The event program includes more than 150 technical reports and interactive sessions, during which participants can discuss with leading experts and developers relevant IT issues, laboratory work for practical acquaintance with products and technologies, the Ask an Expert zone, an exhibition of innovations, and much more.

Among the main topics of the first Tech ∙ Ed Russia 2011 conference : cloud computing and services, the Windows Phone 7 mobile platform and another key topic of the conference will be announced later.

The program of the event is constantly updated. The most current information can be obtained at http://www.msteched.ru , as well as by subscribing to the Twitter of the conference or by tracking the hashtag #ruteched .

Registration for the first Tech ∙ Ed Russia 2011 conference is now open. Until August 1, the maximum discount for tickets is valid, the number of tickets with a discount is limited.

We are pleased to inform the Habrauser of a special special discount for you. When registering for the conference, enter promo code 678955662996 and you will get the opportunity to purchase conference tickets at a reduced price!

Sources

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