On the last day of TechEd Bangalore I managed to reach just in time for BPM200 End-to-End BPM: Hitch-hiker's Guide to next level by Daniel Stollenwerk along with five colleagues of mine. In the morning at office we had a healthy discussion on what BPM tool promises based on Ann Rosenberg & Marc Dietrich's session BPM 103 attended by my colleagues the previous day. Daniel's session with some cool demos answered most of the questions we had in mind around the BPM tool. In fact he showed some advanced stuff like Debugging a Process and research projects like Business Content Browser etc.
After the session and a quick lunch we went over to Clubhouse and met Marilyn Pratt to get an idea of the BPX Certification. She graciously introduced my colleagues to Ann rosenberg who was about to start her session in the clubhouse Theatre on the same topic. Meanwhile I decided to hang out at Clubhouse draft these blogs and browsing through photo coverage done by Marilyn (see flickr link to TechEd). Craig got people write a message in different languages and I did my bit in Bengali. The message read "Come to TechEd and have fun at Clubhouse". We talked a bit on language and scripts with Marilyn writing out our names in Hebrew script pointing out that the written form of Hebrew uses Consonants only with the vowels getting pronounced depending on the context. That was an interesting learning. Also Hebrew is one of the few languages (like Urdu and other Arabic) which is wrtten/read right to left.
So much for foreign languages as it was time to attend my final TechEd session LCM127 Performance Characteristics of Large SAP systems by Susanne Janssen. I had decided to sit in this lecture session to get a background of the topic that is becoming increasingly important at my client. Susanne did not waste much time pointing to the fact most Performance intensive steps are due to custom enhancements which is predominant at my client system. This session is good learning. Doing a bit of homework looking through the TechEd Sessions schedule and getting feedback from fellow SCNers (who attended sessions in other TechEds) really helped in choosing sessions from parallel tracks.
As the session ended I rushed back to Clubhouse just in time to hear Craig declaring Clubhouse is closing as it was 6 pm. He thanked the crowd and mentioned it was the best TechEd this year he attended (he missed Shanghai only). On enquiring he confirmed Bangalore is the best TechEd experience of his as he was impressed with the level of engagement by the participants. This means he has a strong reason to come back next year inspite of losing more than 2 kilos in five days at Bangalore.
With that TechEd 2008 came to a close and saying good bye to fellow community members I headed back for home (got dropped by buddies Abesh and Dipankar).
PS: Later I found the reason for so many people hanging around at Clubhouse even at that late hour. Well the certification exams were scheduled from 7 pm that day and what better place to hang out and relax than Clubhouse.
