Wanted: Great speakers for Exchange Connections 2014

If you’re attending the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in Austin this week, I’m sure that you are up to your neck in Exchange, Lync, and Office 365 content and the thought of presenting at another conference next September couldn’t be further from your mind.

But some of us are deep in the planning process for the IT/DEV Connections conference, which takes place at the Aria Hotel, Las Vegas from September 15-19. I’m taking care of Exchange Connections, which encompasses on-premises Exchange, hybrid Exchange, connectivity between Exchange and other products (third party or Microsoft), and Office 365. And I’m looking for the best possible group of speakers to deliver new and compelling material at the event.

You don't have to attend MEC to propose a session for Connections (you can register session proposals online). But if you’re at MEC, why not seek me out and have a chat? Talking through proposals often refines ideas and sharpens content and it also allows me to figure out where conflicts exist between potential speakers so that everyone gets a fair chance to propose something unique.

I’d love to hear about ideas for 75-minute sessions, ideally reasonably technical in nature (level 300 in Microsoft-conference terminology), that have not been delivered at conferences before. I know that value exists in rerunning sessions from other conferences (for one thing, the speaker’s jokes might have improved), but I’d like to challenge speakers to think afresh and focus on the issues that people encounter today in the areas of design/architecture, deployment, support, and migrations.

Each speaker is asked to deliver two sessions at Connections. We’ll pay you for both sessions and for a nice hotel room plus a reasonable contribution towards your airfare. And we’ll help you to develop and refine your presentation to make sure that it is technically accurate, interesting, and fun to deliver.

So think about the challenge of speaking at a major conference. Everyone has a couple of good sessions in them. You only have to find yours!

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