Themes for Microsoft's Tech.Ed

Australia’s largest technical education event will host more than 2500 IT professionals and developers.

Microsoft Australia’s annual technical education conference, Tech.Ed 2010, will kick off in three weeks’ time at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre on 24 August. This year’s theme, ‘Potential Unleashed’, focuses on how IT professionals and software developers can unlock the capabilities in their existing IT investments and innovate with the tools and resources they have today.

“By focusing on the capabilities and potential of the technology that IT professionals and software developers have already invested in, we are giving delegates the licence to dream and have the confidence to innovative immediately,” said Sarah Vaughan, Technical Audience Lead, Microsoft Australia. “We listened to feedback from delegates from previous years and developed a hands-on, immersive program with a real focus on demonstrations. Through delivering inspirational demos and providing examples of real-world challenges, we hope to inspire ideas of how they might harness their existing technologies to solve challenges and address the opportunities they see today.”

The three key areas that Tech.Ed 2010 will focus on this year include: cloud, client and the web.

• Cloud: Delegates will be shown how to benefit from cloud services, Azure and Microsoft Online Services (MOS), as well as applications available over the cloud, including products that enable you to build private clouds, such as SQL and virtualisation.
• Client devices: With 10 Windows licences sold every seven seconds, people are recognising the compelling proposition of the rich client platform. At Tech.Ed 2010, delegates can explore the opportunities available with Windows 7, and with forthcoming products like Windows Phone 7, Internet Explorer 9 and Natural User Interfaces (NUIs).
• Web: Delegates can experience the benefits of building the richest possible experiences for the web using a breadth of unparalleled tooling and platforms including Expression Studio 4 to Visual Studio 2010, Internet Explorer 9, Silverlight 4 and HTML5.

Other key tracks include Office 2010 and SharePoint, Windows Server, Data Platform and Business Intelligence solutions.

The Tech.Ed 2010 keynote will be presented by Microsoft Australia’s Michael Kordahi and will feature August de los Reyes, Principal User Experience Manager with Windows Design and Research at Microsoft, who will outline Microsoft’s vision of the relationship between people and computers, the future of design and the potential of Natural User Interface (NUI).