SMB Nation is the original and largest SMB channel partner-focused conference, and I’ve been looking forward to it and this trip for months!  Set on the Microsoft campus headquarters in Redmond, Washington, it has state of the art facilities, beautiful grounds, and believe it or not, great food!  Surrounded by around 600 other IT solution providers, many industry-leading vendors, and high-level Microsoft employees focused on the channel is quite an experience!   

I have had the pleasure of putting faces to names and talking shop face-to-face with big names in the SMB IT community, such as Mark Crall, Susan Bradley, Dana Epp, Karl Palachuk, Amy Babinchak, Jeff Middleton, Eric Ligman, and others. 

Today I attended sessions on the importance of mission/ vision/ value and why I am in business, MS CRM features and capabilities, and using virtualization to recover servers.  The last one was an amazing presentation, demo’ing live the ability to restore a crashed SBS Server to a virtual machine… running on a laptop!  Using imaging (Shadow Protect) and virtualization (both Virtual PC and VM Ware), the client could then use it temporarily as the server until replacement server hardware was available, at which point the process would be reversed to move it back.   

Out of all the experiences that these tech conferences offer, the best value by far is the networking with peers and leaders in the SMB IT community.  As they say, it’s not what you know.  It’s who you know.