Tech-Ed Australia 2007 - CommNet Launched

If you're anything like me your eyes probably lit up with joy when you received an email from MS regarding your Tech.Ed 2007 CommNet Logon and realised that Tech.Ed 2007 was less than a month away. Eager to have a look at what was scheduled, I wasted many hours hitting 'Send/Receive' in Outlook hoping to get my password (which was apparently sent in a separate email), regardless of the fact that I've set Outlook to check every 5 mins! Eventually I gave up and played Xbox with the kids!

While chatting to Peter Ward this morning about the fact he has only 1 week to complete and submit his session for Tech-Ed (despite only finding out last week that he was doing one), he mentioned that he logged onto CommNet and was surprised at the content. Turns out he went to the site and clicked on the 'To retrieve your credentials, please click here.' link and received an email to reset his password. Obviously I did the same and now can view the content.

So, what's up there? First off there's a RSS feed link which is good as I'm hoping that there'll be more content very soon. Not that there's not a lot already (262 sessions so far), there are just a few areas that concern me given that Tech.Ed is only four weeks away . For instance:

• There are still 50 sessions that contain no overview whatsoever
• There are no sessions listed for Business Applications (typically where Microsoft Dynamics is)
• There are no sessions listed for Business Intelligence (typically where SQL BI/Reporting is)
• There are only 2 sessions listed under Mobility, however 8 turn up under a search for Mobile but seem mainly associated with provisioning. There appears to be only 2 sessions relating to Mobile Development.
• There are no sessions showing under SOA and Web Services (typically this is where WCF is). There are however 11 sessions for WCF listed under Architect (2), DEV (3) and Connected Systems (6).
• There are no Hands-on-labs (HOL's) or Instructor Led Labs (ILL's) details
• There is no way to added personal events (such as additional Parties, TLG, Chalk-Talk etc) to your Calendar as was the case in previous years
• There is only one session on SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition and it has been combined with one on SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

I'm sure that these issues will (hopefully) be sorted out over the next couple of weeks once everyone realises that they're quickly running out of time. I also get the feeling that there are more ITPro sessions than there are ITDev sessions. This is very hard to verify as in some instances sessions are cross-linked to different tracks while in others they're not.

Perhaps it's time to go down the path that EMEA has and schedule separate IT Forum (Pro) and Developer Tech-Ed's. What do you think?