I have been a speaker at most of them.   I remember the very first "MMS" in Santa Ana, CA.  At that time the conference was hosted by Swynk and Computing Edge (if you remember those two, you're as old as I am).  A couple years later, Altiris acquired Computing Edge and the conference was renamed to the SMS and Win2k conference.  Who remembers the awesome conference in Naples, Florida?  A couple years later Microsoft took ownership of the conference and it’s been the Microsoft Management Summit ever since.

Read about the history of MMS

That’s 10 years of friends, community, IT experiences and knowledge honed by the crew that makes MMS possible.  Martin Dey has "owned" this conference for as long as it has been managed by Microsoft.  Martin is a great friend and should really get an award for his hard work with the conference.   One of Martin's best moves was to keep Stefanie Toth involved in the conference management from year-to-year.  Stefanie has to be THE best conference manager alive.  Seriously.  I mean that.  If you get a chance to see either one at MMS 2008, give them a warm handshake and a big THANK YOU.

myITforum.com and MMS have grown up together.  It's really hard to say where the conference would be today without this community. 

But, even more, it's also really hard to say what the systems management landscape at Microsoft would look like without this community.  You all should be very proud of yourselves.  By coming together and voicing your concerns, desires, solutions, rants, and kudos, you've enabled Microsoft to develop some highly effective solutions for managing environments.

And, I want to thank Microsoft for listening in and supporting this community for so long.  They didn't have to then, and they don't have to now.  It took them a while, but that behemoth starting listening and supporting community.  And, I believe we are all better for it.