Microsoft Partner Conference, coming soon...

Posted by Mike Snyder on June 14, 2006  |  Comments (0)

I just booked my flights for the upcoming Microsoft Partner conference, and I AM PUMPED! I love attending the Microsoft events and you can't go wrong with Boston. No offense to Dallas (where Convergence was held this year), but Boston is much more enticing.

One of the things I enjoy the most about the conference is learning about all of the Microsoft products other than Microsoft CRM. We live and breathe Microsoft CRM every day of the week, all year long...so these conferences provide me a chance to suck up information about the other Microsoft products and solutions we can offer to our customers.

Of course the BIG news for this conference will be Office 2007 and Windows Vista. Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably heard that everyone and their mother is trying to download the Beta 2 versions. How many people want Office 2007 and Vista? Well Microsoft had to throttle their downloads because they're concerned about crashing the ENTIRE Internet.

“We are experiencing extremely high download demand at this time. The wait time to start the download is very long and many customers may be unable to access the download site. To guarantee participation in the Customer Preview Program (to receive both Beta 2 and RC1) we recommend you use the DVD kit order option above,” Microsoft notes on the Vista order and download page.

According to company sources, the Redmond company has anticipated the level of demand but is ceiling on the resources available; an eventual increase in bandwidth could result in an overall collapse of the Internet or degrade its quality for the user because of the networks becoming saturated with the downloaded files.

Presently both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista Beta 2 are available for download in ISO format, the files size reaching 3.5 GB, respectively 4.4 GB. According to Microsoft, the estimated download time for the 32-bit version ranges between 4.5 hours on a Fast Cable/DSL 3.0 mbps connection and 64 hours on a Cable/DSL 256 kbps connection.

I also decided to check out the partner conference sessions list to see which ones will cover Microsoft CRM. I found just four (only 4!?!?) and of course the Brad Wilson session will be "must attend" for anyone in CRM space. Since the conference is still a month away, I assume they will add more sessions about Microsoft CRM but who knows? Again, I expect Office 2007 and Windows Vista to be the stars of this show.