The Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007 website is now live. The conference is scheduled on May 9-11, 2007, in Seattle, WA. It’s not a “traditional” Microsoft technical conference like TechEd and PDC: it’s targeted more on project managers, decision makers, IT manager… and, yes, also IT professionals, but this indicates to me that only a part of the conference schedule will be dedicated to the (inside) technical side of Microsoft BI Products.
There is call for presentations dedicated to customer success story (I have a few possible proposals, but I will ask them before) and a section for customer awards nominations.
At this time there are no details on session topics, but only a track page containing only track names.
Strangely to me, Microsoft has (still?) not considered to give visibility to user communities, and I think this is not a good decision. In the last years Microsoft has made big investments in an effort to be more open toward their customers. “User communities” (with this term I mean peer-to-peer activities in general, ranging from blogs, forums, user groups, actions and sites that share the knowledge in general) in the BI market are still a rarity and probably only Microsoft has a minimum number of them.
This is not to say that I would like to be invited, but only that a BI professional does not have a reference for an “event to attend” where he can meet his peers. PDC is too much developer oriented, TechEd is too much general purpose, a SQL Conference is too much backend-oriented (we also need the client side, thus an integration with Office is necessary). The name “Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference” would seem perfect for this. I hope Microsoft will not lose the opportunity to leverage on existing peer networks.