Microsoft announces MEC 2014 will be in Austin

Austin, Texas, site for the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in 2014

Building on their original teaser that announced the next iteration of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) would be held in 2014 rather than a year after last September's event in Orlando, Microsoft revealed on the Iammec.com site that the date of the next MEC will be March 31 to April 2, 2014 in Austin, Texas.

Why Austin and not one of the "conference cities" like Las Vegas or Orlando? Well, in the 1,500 to 2,500 range, MEC is a relatively small conference when compared to the mega-events like TechEd, so it makes sense to seek somewhere that does not get as much technical conference traffic as the usual venues selected by Microsoft.

And besides, there is precedence because the original MEC event was held in Austin in September 1996. So MEC is returning to its roots some 17 years and 7 months later to discuss Exchange 2013 and Office 365 rather than the Windows NT 3.51-driven Exchange 4.0 server complete with its single 16GB database. Times certainly have changed!

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