Came back from the LEAP 2010 trip to Redmond last weekend. For those who aren’t familiar with LEAP, it stands for Lead Enterprise Architect Program [1]. It’s a program organized by Microsoft in the Netherlands. It starts with five master classes in the Netherlands on the following topics: Software + Services, Business Intelligence, Infrastructure, Identity + Access Management and Information Worker.
After these five classes there is a trip to the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. Nothing was planned on the first day so we had some time to visit downtown Seattle. Worked and lived in Seattle for a while in 2006 so it was nice to be back again.
The rest of the week was filled with sessions which were held at the Microsoft Conference center on the campus. Various topics presented by pretty well known speakers of the product teams. There were sessions on Azure, SharePoint, Software Lifecycle Management, System Center, etc. Also some nice side trips organized to the Microsoft Company store and the Microsoft Home [2].
Besides the jetlag it was a pretty cool week. Everything was well organized like food, transportation and even evening programs. Found the master classes in the Netherlands not so valuable if you`re already working in the Microsoft space for a while, though the trip to Redmond makes it still a nice program to join :). Guess LEAP will probably run again next year, so check it out if you haven`t done it yet.
[1] http://leaphaip.msnlevents.net
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mshome/default.mspx