This, being my first year of going to WinConnections, was a positive experience that will definitely have some immediate impact in projects that I will be working on in the office.  For those that have not heard of WinConnections, it is a conference that is held twice a year at two different locations.  This year, the Spring Session (the one I just went to) was held at Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando and the Fall Session will be held at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas.  I will separate this review of the Spring Session into 2 different sections: The Facility and The Conference.

The Facility

The conference was held at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, which is considered a 4 star premier resort in the Orlando area. In terms of the conference rooms and grounds, I definitely agree.  The sessions were held in sectioned off rooms in the ballroom area, and there were no problems with room size and equipment.  For convenience,  I also stayed at the hotel during the conference.  The hotel offered a free night for conference attendees. I will admit that the rooms were not what I expected from a 4 star hotel for these reasons:

1. I did not get the room I originally requested. Instead of getting a room with a single king bed, I received a room with two double beds.  When I called the front desk, they said that they did not have rooms available with a single king bed.  I did make my reservation around 3 months in advance, so I’m guessing that it was a lower priority since it received a promotional rate.
2. The room itself was a little outdated, which is understandable since the hotel was built a few decades ago.  The electric outlet by the desk was stripped (meaning plugs did not stay in the socket if bumped at all).  This will probably not be an issue after 2010, mainly because the hotel is currently undergoing renovations that will be completed next year.

However, there were numerous points that I did appreciate from the stay:

1. The view from the room was awesome. I ended up on the 8th floor with a good view of the pool, lake, and some of the Disney attractions like Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Downtown Disney.
2. The room was very clean (which should definitely be expected from a high-end resort).
3. The bed was very comfortable, one of the best hotel beds I have slept on.
4. The room was quiet, even with a few families staying in the rooms next to mine.  I could hear the usual playing at the pool, but this was not an issue when it was time to sleep.
5. The grounds are top-notch, and a fairly large selection of restaurants are available on-site.

Overall, I would give the hotel a 3.5 out of 5.  Once the rooms are renovated, it would be a 5 out of 5.

The Conference

The content at this conference was focused on Windows Server 2008/Windows Server 2008 R2 features, Group Policy, Exchange 2007 (Exchange Connections was co-located at the event), Windows 7 (including a keynote given by Mark Minasi) and other technical topics that a server administrator might encounter (such as storage and security).  There were some not-as-technical topics discussed at the conference, including a talk on the future of IT (including a keynote given by Andre Mintz) and privacy.  Overall, I thought the sessions were put together very well, and I received a lot of takeaway items from the sessions that I attended.  I found it very helpful that slides were available with links to tools discussed and demoed during each session.

My favorite sessions were given by Mark Minasi (Windows 7 keynote and Hyper-V overview), Jeremy Moskowitz (Group Policy Pre-conference Session), Alan Sugano (Virtualization Pre-conference session and Storage overview), and Dan Holme (MMC Console customization).  The first day featured an all-Microsoft lineup, with a few familiar TechNet event speakers making an appearance.  The other two days featured accomplished speakers, authors, and managers from the IT arena.  The one speaker that I did miss from the conference was Steve Riley from Microsoft.  He did not make the conference.
The only additional sessions that I would have liked to see were sessions targeted toward developers.  I know DevConnections is targeted toward developers, but as someone that does a little bit of everything at the company it would be nice to have a session or two related to .NET (it is a Windows conference afterall) or best practices for setting up ASP.NET or PHP applications on an IIS server.  If you are strictly a developer, you’ll probably want to check out something like DevConnections or TechEd instead.  The lack of development sessions is no surprise however, since the organizers make the division between their WinConnections and DevConnections conferences very clear.  This is more of a wishlist item that will probably not have much agreement.

This size of this conference is smaller than the TechEd events that Microsoft puts on every year, which can be both a good and bad thing.  At any given time, there were about 6 one hour (or hour and fifteen minute) sessions going on simultaneously.  I found that the sessions were varied enough that I found something interesting and relevant at every time slot (YMMV of course).  There is probably more variety with a greater number of sessions at a conference like TechEd, especially with the developer sessions being held .  On the other hand, the level of intimacy found at a smaller conference can definitely be valuable.  The smaller sessions made it easier to get questions answered, and seemed to spark more discussion with some speakers.  I liked the smaller format, so this was a good point for me.

Overall, I would give the content of the conference a 4.7 out of 5 since I came back with a lot of takeaway items and the sessions were generally entertaining and educational.

Conclusion

So what should you take away from this review? (Besides the fact that I write too much…)  Basically, I had a great experience and learned a lot from WinConnections.  If there is room in the conference budget, I would definitely go back next year.

If your experience differed or you have something to add, please leave a comment.