Event Overview: MVP Open Day 2010 @ MSIDC, Hyderabad

MVP Open Day 2010 was a annual event where all MVPs from different regions met & shared their technical expertise. Apart from it various technical sessions were conducted to enrich the MVP’s. MVP Open day @ MSIDC invited MVPs from Australia, New Zealand , India & Nepal and was held from 20-23 January 2010 at the Microsoft India Development Center at Hyderabad, India.

20th January 2009

Due to some Telangana issues in the city, i caught up the venue bit late, and when i reached Hotel ISTA it was almost lunch time. After registration i met my roommate Pawan Kumar, MVP-Consumer Security. Followed by Ashish Mohta & Hima Binduvejella. Discussed some MVP future related issues with Hima like we have shared earlier on the MVP portal.

Lunch was followed by IT Pro Roundtable with Ravi Sankar who discussed about communities and a DPE Roundtable with Stuti Shukla, Director (Marketing), DPE where we were divided into teams and asked to discuss on a few topics :
1. Top5 Challenges faced by individual developers & How Microsoft should address them
2. How Microsoft most effectively address Application Development needs of the small and medium organizations in India.
3. Winning Microsoft against Open Source in the web application space.

I was teamed with Vijay Raj, Md. Reza (Academic Advisor whom i have met earlier too in a seminar conducted by my University in 2008) 7 few more. We were with the topic “Winning Microsoft against Open Source in the web application space” where we compared LAMP, Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (scripting language) & WISA, Windows (operating system), Internet Information Services (web server), Microsoft SQL Server (database) and ASP (scripting language). Further we discussed some suggestions what Microsoft is doing and what it must do. Abhishek Kant (MVP-Lead, India) made the things more intersting by introducing Karma points for every recognizable activity by a team or an individual. And the person woth highest number of Karma points could take a XBOX home followed by some WinMo, External HDD, Mouse & Wireless headphone.

After Round table it was time for Karoke Party which featured fun games in which we have to provide an egg cushion using the given material so that it wont break down when thrown from height, making a bridge using newspaper that can hold a number of glasses full of water and few more .

Met a lot of MVP’s in Windows Desktop Experience including Anand Khanse, Shantanu Kaushik, Manan, Shyam Lal.  After dinner we had Open session which was kind of “Graveyard Sessions” which were optional and continued till 2 AM in the night. The open session featured a Google vs Microsoft war and some great blogging & SEO tips by Amit Agarwal. Various topics were discussed. It was a knowledgeable, and an interesting Discussion session.

21th January 2009

After an exhaustive first day, i was bit tired for the day 2. Day two started with Windows 7 Deployment Roundtable @ Hotel ISTA. Discussion on deployment enhancements, deployment tools for windows like MAP,MDT etc was done. The very next thing was a Technical Opening Session by Srini Koppolu (CVP & MD, MSIDC) at MSIDC. The very first thing i noticed @MSIDC was a huge poster of Windows 7 is here on the MSIDC building. Office campus was quite good which reminded me of Adobe’s office in Noida, although not as huge. Srini spoke about various Microsoft technologies & products, some NDA stuff, Missions to increase computing penetration in India. He patiently answered most of the queries too. After the keynote it was time for Group Photo “a Kodak moment”.

Next were 3 sessions parallel for Developers, Consumers, and ITPros. I choose the one with consumers where we had a Session on Win7 and the way forward for Windows by Suryanarayana Shastri, Senior PM, WWLG. He discussed about new features of Windows 7 like taskbar, federated search, libraries & more, most of which were already known to me and other MVP’s too. This session was followed by an interesting session on Troubleshooting and Debugging – an Holistic approach by Nischay Anikar, GTSC. He discussed approaches and workarounds for troubleshooting. Tools like XPerf, Debugging tools, SysInternal tools like Process monitor, process explorer and how they can help in troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the problem. Later on i came to know that this 2 hour packed session was just a glimpse of what is a Week full of In-detail training of Troubleshooting is.Finally we had last session of the day How to deliver Media Services with IIS 7.x by Punit Shah, Technical Lead, GTSC. He demonstrated use of IIS media services to stream videos flawlessly using Bit Rate Throttling, an IIS Media Services extension  over the internet, no more waiting for a video to buffer now.

Sessions over it was time to checkout the company store @ MSIDC. Not a lot of products were available but a few were catchy and i picked up a Microsoft T, M$ Metal Business card holder & a Win7 bottle.A Hyderabad Outing was planned for us guys and it was Golconda fort where we had a light & sound show narrating the history of Golconda fort.

There was no Graveyard session for the night, so after an edible dinner we guys just sit for some casual chat related to the forums and technology and soon it turned out to be another unofficial graveyard session where Windows mobile was discussed as well.

22nd January 2009

We have Office 2010 round table, a lot of features of office 2010 were discussed which i did already in a session at DelhiITpro. It was followed by Technical Opening Session by Rajiv Kumar, GM, MBD, MSIDC.

Next Session was on SharePoint 2010 – Improved Experiences for Small Organisations by Rao Korupolu & Sanjay Manghnani. I was really amazed to see how web solutions can be easily managed with Sharepoint. Next were FEEDBACK Chalk Talks with Windows Desktop Experience where we discussed various issues, topics, suggestions with Windows development team. The topics we discussed and talked about included Virtualization, Windows XP mode and futur of Windows. Again a lots of NDA stuff.

There was an offtrack session, Self Development Training Media Ready by Tushar Makkar, SMSG which discussed on dealing with the print media.

In the evening there was an attendee party where we all were treated like Nizams, we were showered with Rose petals, Rosewater, we could dress up like a Nizam and get our pic, it included loads of Qawalis, contests for Karma Coupons, and Hookas too.

Meanwhile there were Xbox consoles outside the party hall and you could win a Xbox Goodie by beating the opponent of yours (on Xbox). And i won a Microsoft-T & a Xbox-Cap this time.

23rd January 2009

Final day for MVP open day @ MSIDC started with a Keynote by Chandrasekar Gopalan, Director (Dev Support), GTSC where he discussed on Support and Post Deployment Support and Services available. This was followed by Addressing by MVP Lead, Abhishek Kant. Up next we had live demos of

• BizTalk RFID
• Microsoft Phone Data Manager : Backup your mobile phone data with Phone data Manager
• Microsoft Indic langauge tool
• Windows XP Mode
• Bing Demo
• SQL server Demo

A loads of interesting demos were followed by winner of Xbox with max Karma coupons. Overall a great experience. A lot of interactions & networking with people. Usefulness of each day @ mvpopenday had progressively increased. Learned a lot of new things and enjoyed every bit of it. A suggestion which i included in my Video too was frequency of such event to be increased. Such in-person events to be conducted more than once an year.

Events Photographs are uploaded

• http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=145750&id=762174369
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/greatfriendsbiz/sets/72157623243710576/
• http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=150358&id=729361840&l=af46bf88ef
• http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=195413&id=502148097&ref=mf

P.S. although i have made sure i am not including any NDA stuff, incase i have do notify me.