I am at the TechPulse 2008 conference brought to us by MyTechPartners (http://www.mytechpartners.net/) and Success Computing (http://www.sccnet.com/). The website address for the conference is: http://www.techpulse2008.com/. The conference is located at the Marriott off 394 and 169. The location seems to be of good size... the break out rooms hold about 80 people in each of them, which is a good size for a conference.
New Horizons of MN did not participate as a vendor at this conference this year, however I would encourage them to do so for next year. There are over 150 people here at the conference. Topics include SharePoint KIP's/ Unified Threat Management/ Small business server 2008 sneak peek/ mobility solutions/ MS Office Tips and Tricks and Windows Vista / Business Continuity/ Co-Localization / Virtualization / Blade Servers / PCI Compliance / Email Compliance and more.
I walked in and was greeted by the hosts of the event in a casual and friendly way. They gave out nametags, bags for the day with the schedule in it, and directed everyone to the opening presentation and the vendor booths. The kick off was done by the presidents of the two partnering companies. What's interesting is that he even mentioned that they were competitors, yet partnered together in education to bring this event free to their customers. What a great partnership way to work together! I applaud them for that effort!
I'm in the breakout room now waiting to hear the first presenter. I'm going to sit the SharePoint KPI session and see if it's a good fit for the BI User Group or the SharePoint user group. I'll share my comments about the sessions later in the day.
Vendors present today include Agility Solutions / Maestro II / Watchguard / Integra / IBM / Lenova / SonicWALL / Atomic Datacenters / Cymphonix / Digital Planet / Makor Solutions / Ricoh / Waterford Technologies and DTS Copiers.