Exchange Heads to The Experts Conference in Las Vegas

@Jim: MEC was tough to walk away from for sure.  A great event indeed.  In the 90's, the email administrator community was still pretty tight and MEC was the right way for our team to gather this community in a single place for deep learning and dialouge.  The Exchange team was still small and the product footprint small but rapidly growing.  15 years later, after the first MEC in Austin in 1996 (my first MEC was Boston in 1998), the number of IT Professionals that touch Exchange everyday has exploded and most of them...you...need to stay up-to-speed on a much broader set of products and technologies than only Exchange.  Today, Exchange admins that also need to educate themselves on Lync and SharePoint is pretty common, along with certainly Office or at least Outlook.  As a result of this expansion of the overall Microsoft porfolio in the productivity space and the broadening needs of the IT generalist, we made the decision to focus our education and readiness efforts on the worldwide TechEd events as opposed to continuing to run our own, stand-alone conference.  This allows attendees to get up-to-speed on a variety of topics, including Exchange, and provides local access for folks that were not able to fly to North America for MEC in the past.  I totally get that for many of you reading this blog, in particular, a dedicated Exchange conference would do rather nicely -- hey, we'd like it too -- but in a world of limited time and resources...

I love the feedback.  You never know what might happen in the future...but, in the meantime, I am looking forward to Vegas later this month.