I’ve just got the Tech Ed evals back in and thought I’d put up some of the results for all to see. Before I do that – if you are a speaker, you should expect to see an email from me in the next 24 hours with full session feedback including all your comments.
Overall Averages
This year we seem to have done much better with the overall feedback than in previous years. The average speaker and session scores are in the table below;
| Tech Ed 2007 | Tech Ed 2008 | |
| Session Score | 7.36 | 7.5 |
| Speaker Score | 7.68 | 7.79 |
Top 10 sessions
One of the surprising things is the feedback on the lunchtime sessions this year. The lunchtime sessions were a bit mixed this year – some technical sessions and some not so technical sessions. The feedback overall – including the lunchtime sessions gives us the following top 10:
| Code | Name | Speaker | Score |
| GEN201 | Microsoft New Generation Certifications | Trika Harms zum Spreckel | 8.67 |
| SVR380 | HP Insight Dynamics | Darren Wood | 8.67 |
| SEC200 | Do these 10 things or get 0wn3d | Steve Riley | 8.62 |
| UNC303 | Going Big! A discussion on deploying large mailboxes with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 without breaking the bank | Sandy Millar | 8.59 |
| SOA310 | Implementing RESTful services with Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 – Security, scalability and controlling the URI (Part 2 of 2) | Rob Bagby | 8.49 |
| SEC201 | 21st Century Networking | Steve Riley | 8.45 |
| ARC209 | How IT will change in the next 10 years | Miha Kralj | 8.43 |
| SEC305 | Virtualization and security: What does it mean for me? | Steve Riley | 8.38 |
| SEC306 | Privacy: The why, what and how | Steve Riley | 8.37 |
| GEN202 | How to make your blog suck less | Scott Hanselman | 8.33 |
Its interesting to see Trika’s session rate well – certification is clearly of interest to customers! If we take lunchtime sessiosn out of the equation we get the following as the top list of breakout sessions.
| Code | Name | Speaker | Score |
| SEC200 | Do these 10 things or get 0wn3d | Steve Riley | 8.62 |
| UNC303 | Going Big! A discussion on deploying large mailboxes with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 without breaking the bank | Sandy Millar | 8.59 |
| SOA310 | Implementing RESTful services with Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 – Security, scalability and controlling the URI (Part 2 of 2) | Rob Bagby | 8.49 |
| SEC201 | 21st Century Networking | Steve Riley | 8.45 |
| ARC209 | How IT will change in the next 10 years | Miha Kralj | 8.43 |
| SEC305 | Virtualization and security: What does it mean for me? | Steve Riley | 8.38 |
| SEC306 | Privacy: The why, what and how | Steve Riley | 8.37 |
| OFC342 | Project and Application Portfolio Management: What, why, how | Youssef Mourra | 8.31 |
| DEV375 | Reactive Programming | Ivan Towlson | 8.27 |
| UNC309 | Advanced protection of Exchange Server with Data Protection Manager | Jason Buffington | 8.27 |
Its great to see Ivan’s session on Reactive Programming make the top 10 breakout sessions – well done Ivan!
Top 10 speakers
If we roll up the speaker scores to get the top 10 speakers for Tech Ed NZ we get the following list. I hereby announce that these are officially the kings of Tech Ed!
| Speaker | Average Score | Sessions Delivered |
| Steve Riley | 8.79 | 4 |
| Trika Harms zum Spreckel | 8.76 | 1 |
| Scott Hanselman | 8.72 | 3 |
| Miha Kralj | 8.52 | 1 |
| Rob Bagby | 8.49 | 3 |
| Johann Kruse | 8.48 | 2 |
| Greg Low | 8.47 | 2 |
| Yossef Mourra | 8.44 | 1 |
| Sandy Millar | 8.38 | 2 |
| Jason Buffington | 8.34 | 3 |
The only session in this list from a lunchtime session is Trikas, for what it is worth the next top score in the list is Gary Gross who delivered a single session on Systems Center Mobile Device Manager and scored 8.27. This was followed by the top NZ community speaker who was Ivan Towlson with an average speaker score of 8.21 from two sessions.
My congratulations to all the speakers, but particularly to those speakers who scored in the top 10 with more than one session – this is particularly difficult and shows polished presentation skills that are consistent. Having said that, dont underestimate how hard it is to be in this list – the average speaker score is extremely high – so well done to all those speakers mentioned above!
Very interesting that none of the web sessions feature in the top 10 of any list (although Scott H rates in the top 3 speakers). Would this suggest that the sessions weren’t as well received, or are us web devs just more critical from picking apart all those CSS quirks?
There are also no Client & Management or Server sessions there. In fact of the 11 true tracks at Tech Ed, only 5 of them are represented in the first list and 7 in the second list. However there is far better coverage in the speaker list… Two of ScottHa’s sessions were Web.
My experience suggests that developers are more likely to be RSS subscribers and bloggers than IT Pro’s. That seems to make a difference.