If you've never gone to MMS before, this should be the best year yet. If you've thought it might be some junket where Microsoft and other vendors are just pushing junk to sell you, you're wrong. I think MMS 2002 was the closest to that, but every one since then has been great. You get a huge selction of classes and labs. If you can't fit them all in, you get a DVD of all the sessions which you can share with your team back home. You get a good feel for the direction of SMS\SCCM\SCOM which can help you in planning for the future. You can meet absolutely brilliant people who've done amazing things for their companies which can give you good ideas for you to take back to your company.
Let me give you a real-world example. Paul Thompsen from Microsoft gave a class at MMS regarding an SMS health script. He wasn't allowed to just hand that script out to others for legal reasons, but he told you how to go about it. So we did just that at Wells Fargo. Over the course of about 6 months, we just kept finding things that could break the SMS client and adding them to our script. I think we have almost all possible problems being taken care of now with our script. By making it a startup script in a GPO set for most workstations, we were able to pick up about 8000 machines that were not running the SMS client for a variety of reasons. Now how long would it have taken to get all those into SMS one by one? How many guys would have been asked to go manually patch them each month because SMS wasn't working? The trip to MMS clearly paid for itself that year. Heck, for all these years! (By the way, that script is posted here).
Or when we planned to blow a bunch of money on new servers for SMS 2003, how could we be sure our Visio plan of machines and locations would really work? One session at MMS with Boeing showed we were right on track.
The people you meet, the great location, free food between classes, parties, etc., are just the icing on the cake. But be certain that the trip really will pay for itself.
