Mr. Angiulo said that a firm release data for SP1 will be announced in three weeks but SP1 could be as late as March 2008.

One reason for the late release of SP1 conveyed by Mr. Angiulo was "we (Microsoft) wanted to release it with Office SP1, due in the March/April timeframe." 

Never can we remember a Microsoft Project or Project Server service patch released along with Office service patches.  As a customer I would be pretty irritated about this excuse. If Microsoft has fixed something like core functional problems and thoroughly tested the fix, then not releasing the service patch to the entire user base isn’t being customer focused - an attitude typically associated with market dominance and we have only ourselves to blame for that.

Frankly, we were disappointed in that response from Mr. Angiulo, and with all the little tips throughout the conference from Microsoft folks on ways to deal with functional and technical problems. Like the following tip for opening a project that is “stuck in check-out” when you have already saved it, closed it, and checked the project in. Here is the tip: “Open the project in read only, close it, and then try to open it again.” We got lots of those little snippets of wisdom during the conference and some we have tested without the expected results.

As for the success of the Microsoft Project Technical Conference, it failed to gain much momentum, provided little value, cost too much and finally fizzled out on Wednesday afternoon with people walking around asking, “Is this it?” It is our strong opinion that the conference tended to parallel most EPM deployments when they have not been planned well, not driven from the top-down, and without with a strong performance management system in place. Clearly, the EPM product group is not being managed well and the result is:

1. An EPM 2007 system with far too many problems that are not being publically addressed, and

2. The most lack-luster industry conference we have ever attended.

Maybe this post from the product group blog says it all, they are simply “closed for the season” but still taking license fees. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/project/

Next year, we think they should consider holding the conference in a location that could support the technical requirements of their guests…maybe a city that can at least provide internet service at the conference site, a little more coffee and a few more chairs and tables… maybe in a city like Mountain View next to Google.

By the way, as the Project blog states, they are “hard at work designing the next version of Project Server” and Mr. Ballmer did provide a demo. Stupid us, we thought they would be working hard to address all of the EPM 2007 issues, problems, and bugs.