BY:  Collin Quiring

This blog entry is about the conference itself and not really about Microsoft Project as I have decided to talk about them separately – even though the conference is all about the tool.

On the first day of the Conference the keynote was given by Ludo Hauduc, General Manager of the Project Business Unit.  This was an interesting keynote and he gave a quick history of Project Management and then of Microsoft Project.  Some of the facts that were interesting to me were:

·         Project has 20 million users

·         There are 10,000 Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Customer Organizations

·         There are 6,400 Microsoft Certified Project 2007 Professionals

·         There are 35,000 members of MPUG (Microsoft Project User Group)

·         There are over 1,000 partners helping Microsoft with Project

Also as part of the keynote session were some “guest speakers” from a couple customers and partners about their usage of Project and Project Server. 

Also, some customer and partner awards were distributed.  I bet that over time, the customer and partner awards segment becomes more and more popular and that the competition starts heating up.

For the rest of the day there were numerous sessions of varying intensity on business and tool topics.  I will talk more about what I attended and learned in upcoming Project blogs.  In addition to the educational sessions was a great new feature of the conference – Hands on Labs.  These were self-paced labs with a number of pre-selected topics.  I think that this was a great aspect of the conference this year!  This allowed for some “how to” and some education on how the tool worked.

In the evening, EPM Live hosted an event at Corona Ranch.  This was a great break after a day of sitting in classrooms.  There was a short rodeo event as well which ended up involving some Project Managers running around the arena chasing a calf.  One of them tackled the calf much to the crowd’s delight.