MMS 2008 - Friday
Summary: home again. And thanks again for the opportunity to talk with you (if you were at the conference)!
Fridays at MMS are usually relatively useless but this one was much better. I got to breakfast about 8AM and was pleasently surprised to find many people moving about, mostly going to sessions. Apparently there was feedback that people would like sessions starting around 8:30 Friday morning, and that was done this year. In the past the sessions started closer to 10:00, on the assumption that people would need more rest Friday (for some reason...). But that meant there was only time for two sessions on Friday mornings, and with many people catching flights, the attendance was very thin for the last session. They're all available on the DVD, so the sessions were worth presenting, but it didn't feel the same.
The day started with a good breakfast conversation, followed by my session on how we do ConfigMgr at Microsoft IT, and then I sat in on a session on Asset Intelligence 1.5. More good conversations. From there it was a leisurely trip home. It was nice to finally read some newspapers and think about the week.
My presentation today seemed to work well. I felt the audience was more engaged than during my client health presentation. The evaluation numbers back that up - they were the kind of numbers we all want - in the top 15 overall. My previous session this week had a little less than average numbers, so passable in a sense, but not as good as you deserve.
I must admit that one of the ironies of presenting has been that the topics I'm most passionate about are not necessarily the ones that get the best response. For example, a few years back I gave a presentation on local policies, which I think have the potential to revolutionize how we do computer management in several key scenarios. It even had cool demos. That presentation even lead to Jeff Tondt writing a TechNet magazine article on the subject. But much of the audience didn't buy into the concept, and the review scores weren't great for that presentation - not bad but not as good as they should be. Another presentation I gave that year got better scores. This year I presented on client health, which I'm even more passionate about, but it got the middling scores. I can see how I can improve that presentation (thanks for the feedback everyone), but I liked the content... The really good news is that the client health presentation led to many great conversations on the topic of client health, and I look forward to postings based on those observations. Even more importantly, I really believe those conversations will lead to better solutions in the future - so keep them coming. But maybe the lesson is that real-world results are more relevant than specific-case concepts. Something like that...
Anyways, it was sad to see the end of the week, as always. Not as sad as in some years, but only because I know we'll be back together before we know it (even if it is a year). There should be some kind of final goodbye speech, but since many people are gone, I suppose that wouldn't work. Maybe at the Thursday night party?
This weekend I'll post some general observations, and make some updates based on some notes. For now it's nice to get back to normal life...
p.s. The blogosphere had a bit of observations about my client health presentation: Aaron Czechowski and Sherry Kissinger. But nothing on any of my potentially more controversial statements (maybe that's a good thing...)