The final day at Interact 2008 was a fitting end to the conference; for me it was definitely more mellow because there wasn’t a keynote, and I didn’t attend as many breakout sessions. On the other hand, I would be lying if I said I didn’t learn anything.
To replace the keynote the conference organizers had planned a "Birds of a Feather" sessions, small gatherings of about five to fifteen people each that focused on certain topics of discussion, such as "Mobilizing Unified Communications," "Voice Infrastructure," and "Architecting for a UC World." This morning Mark and I attended the "Blogging and Other Online Activities" group (you can probably guess why). There were a lot of great ideas floated not just about blogging, but also about other online collaboration tools like forums, wikis, and newsgroups.
The most interesting discussion was around forums, because there was a lot of debate concerning their effectiveness. I use forums for both technical and interpersonal reasons, so it was interesting to see that the issues of contention apply to both types of forums:
- They are not effective tools for finding answers to questions.
The forums at MSDN are currently the only forums that I know of that allow users to mark posts as answers. Even so, what if threads have tens or even hundreds of pages? It is not easy to sift through that much content just to find an answer to your question. The forum and thread format, however, does facilitate general discussion threads, but with large threads it’s still not easy to keep track of all that’s been said.
- Put up an FAQ list? Nobody reads it.
One thing I’ve noticed in both sets of forums is that nobody reads the FAQ. Most people just rush in and post because they want their question to receive special attention (maybe that means their question will be answered more quickly?). One brilliant idea I heard that combats this approach and steers more focus toward the FAQ is for moderators to delete threads that ask questions that are already in the FAQ.
Afterwards, I headed to the Developer Code Camp, where Paul Robicheaux presented the basics of the UCMA and Albert Kooiman did a short demo of Speech Server 2007′s capabilities. I was already familiar with Speech Server 2007, but it was very valuable to understand the purpose of the UCMA and how developers could utilize it (which I discussed yesterday). The code camp at this conference was a little rushed to cover all of the APIs we wanted to, but there was still time before the close of the conference to get hands-on experience with the APIs in the hands-on lab area.
The hands-on labs were divided into two sets depending on your interest: IT professional labs for learning about various deployment and administration scenarios for OCS and its roles, as well as and developer professional labs for developers to experiment with the various APIs (excluding the UCC API). As you can probably guess, I participated only in the developer labs. Unfortunately there was not enough to time to complete all of the labs, but the proctors allowed us to take copies of the lab manuals so we could use them later on. The three APIs I tinkered with were the OC SDK, the UCMA, and the UC AJAX SDK. My impressions? I definitely am not a fan of the AJAX SDK—it is a bit of a pain to have to type out all the XML to communicate with the CWA server role. The OC SDK and the UCMA are higher-level abstractions which are fairly easy to use. But after two days of learning about these APIs I have enough understanding to be able to build more effective applications, which I believe was the point of the code camp.
The last session I attended was a panel on planning voice architecture and deployment in Microsoft OCS; it turned out to a great opportunity to hear common deployment and administration concerns on a melange of topics like OCS interoperability with products from other vendors, 64-bit support, and Windows Server 2008 support.
Overall, Interact 2008 was a fantastic event, ripe with opportunity for everyone who attended. Through these blog posts I have highlighted the sessions themselves, but I didn’t talk much about the many connections that both of us have made through the event, who will be invaluable as develop and deploy OCS at Extend Health later this year. The conference was well worth the effort, and I will likely attend next year’s Interact as well.
The closing event was in a live music venue called Anthology, located in the Little Italy district of San Diego. As always, I’ll let the pictures do the talking (toward the bottom), but I’ll say that there are few things better than watching the Interact 2008 attendees performing karaoke. 
The Dock Behind the Sheraton
Anthology
What, no pictures of you surfing like Mark? Looks like you had fun.