Enterprise Collaboration sessions selected for IT/DEV Connections 2015

It was gratifying to receive so many session submissions for IT/DEV Connections 2015, which takes place at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas on September 14-17. As you might know, this year the conference is organized around a set of tracks that we think match the interests of attendees, with "Enterprise Collaboration" being the track of most interest to those looking for Exchange and Office 365 content.

Because many constituencies must be satisfied, selecting sessions from the set submitted is a bit of an art form. Some folks are only interest in on-premises content and want to know the latest and greatest about how to make their servers work better. Some want to know about the latest technology, so they'll be all ears for news about the Wave 16 release of the Office server products due in late 2015 (Exchange 2016, SharePoint 2016, etc.). Some are all-in the cloud and could care less about what a server is or what it does, and some want information about developing code on a platform, be that using Exchange Web Services or a SharePoint workflow.

You might imagine that you can only select from the submitted sessions, but that's not quite true. We keep some sessions back to be used for new and interesting topics that arise between now and the conference. For example, we know that Microsoft is likely to make some major announcements at their Ignite event in Chicago in early May, so we might need sessions to cover that news. We also know that Office 365 introduces new technology on an ongoing basis, not all of which is well flagged by Microsoft, so we might need sessions to review and explain these developments. For the same reasons, we're pretty flexible about working with speakers to make sure that the content they present at the conference is as up-to-date and pertinent as possible, even if it doesn't quite match what they said they'd like to talk about when they submitted session proposals.

The upshot of all these moving parts is that we can't be definite about what will eventually be presented in September. But we know that many people need to submit a justification to attend technical conferences as otherwise their employers might think that they're off for a four-day fun fest in Vegas. Alas, if the truth were known, it is really four days of solid effort and wrinkled brows as speakers and attendees alike engage in a mutual struggle to comprehend and master technology.

To return to how you can justify coming to IT/DEV Connections, I can tell you that we have:

There's an abundance of knowledge to share and the important thing is that it's practical, hands-on knowledge from people who work with the technology to solve business problems daily.

Details of the initial batch of selected sessions will soon be available on the IT/DEV Connections site. Hopefully you'll agree that they are a good set. If not, I'm sure you'll let me know.

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