Notes & Queries from TechDays 2011

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I have been at TechDays Live all last week and although I did a bit of presenting, I was mainly there to listen and keep the week running smoothly.  I scribbled down a few notes during the various sessions I was in which I thought might be of interest:

  • Easyjet have an amazing set of stories around their IT.  For example their internet site has been down for one  2 hour period over the last four year and was down to a switch failure.  During that period SQL Server itself has never been off line during that period and they have one DBA. 
  • The Royal Mail is moving to hyper-V and although this and Office 365 might seem like a loss in revenue for their outsourcing partner, CSC, it is actually beneficial for CSC as well.
  • I got hassled by a Data Protection Manager fan that it is amazing but Microsoft UK never present any content on it.  What can I say -  it just works, and hopefully we will have a session on it when all of System Center 2012 launches in the meantime check out the DPM blog by my good friend  Jason Buffington.
  • Ridgian, a SharePoint partner provided a rich geospatial experience to Cherwell District council. What I found out about this is that Ridgian had cracked the problem of converting Ordnance Survey (easting and northing based) to plot data.gov .uk  onto Bing maps (which uses latitude and longitude).
  • EMI with help from another partner Adatis have implemented the new Master Data Services in SQL Server 2008 R2 , to help fill in the blanks in their data warehouse.
  • The North West  Ambulance Service asked Ascribe to implement the Microsoft BI stack to help with resource planning and now that’s mission critical for them.  BTW I was on an IT PRO webcast with them a couple of months ago.  
  • Matt McSprirt’s session on a comparison of Vmware vs Hyper-V + System Center was my personal favourite in that he was one of the best presenters and his content was simple yet effective.
  • I went to Planky’s excellent Azure Boot Camp, ..

 

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so that I could understand how the various roles work together, however Simon and I spent quite a bit of lab time helping the developers get all the prerequisites installed.  Where we couldn’t fix the problem (e.g. delegates on XP can’t run IIS 7) I ended up doing some ad hoc VDI from my uber Dell Precision M6500 which was pretty good considering we were running Azure and remote desktop over RDP for four sessions over the one adapter.  The lab was pretty straight forward otherwise and despite my lack of c# skills I got through it so it might be good to do re run for IT Professionals interested in the cloud let me know what you think

The decks for the week will all be available from the site where you registered as well as the session recording, and I’ll update this post with the links.