Tech Ed 2007 (Orlando): Day 2 Recap
Alrighty then ... Day 2 has now come to a conclusion and I thought I would post a quick entry on my thoughts and experiences from yesterday.
Since I was able to get more than 8 hours of sleep on Monday night, I was awake and alert for most of the day yesterday. For the first session, I decided to listen to Paul Duffy speak on Office Communications Server 2007 and the voice capabilities with that product in conjuction with Communicatior 2007. As usual, Paul did an excellent job presenting the materials. This session did a great job of covering the key capabilities of OCS 2007 and the Software based VOIP possibilities that companies have available (when the product releases). Even though I've been using Office Communicator 2007 with these capabilities (I have the Catalina device) for a little while now, I still learned a few new useful tidbits during the session. I am soooo totally excited about this product and the possibilities!!!! (Yes, I'm a bit jaded, but c'mon, this is just freaky cool!)
For the second session, I attended the AD Domain Services in Windows Server 2008 session. Since this was more of an overview than a deep dive, the majority of the information was "old news" to me. However, it was still good to get another view point on the information and I still found it to be useful. There are definite improvements in the way AD works in Windows Server 2008 and I'm confident customers will really like them. I already hear great things about the Read Only DC capabilities as well as the new Password policies model. If you're wondering what these two capabilities are all about, then you haven't been paying attention and need to go read up on it: www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008. Unfortunately, I did not stay for the entire session as I wanted to grab some lunch before I had to go do my booth duty time from 12 PM - 3 PM.
Booth duty at the OCS 2007 booth involved answering a lot of questions around OCS 2007, Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005, Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003. I realized how much I had already forgotten about Exchange 2003 and LCS 2005 - very sad :-(. There were a number of people who had attended the 24 Part Exchange 2007 Webcast series who stopped by to introduce themselves and say "hi". It was a pleasure meeting you and I hope more people will stop by to say "hi" this afternoon (3 PM - 7 PM).
Since I didn't finish withy my booth duty until over half way through the 2:45 - 4:00 session, I decided to take some time chatting with folks from the Exchange and OCS Product Groups to secure time slots for more video interviews. Since they were willing, I will be doing some recordings today (Wednesday) and hope to post them to the Exchange and OCS blogs shortly following Tech Ed.
The last session that I attended on Tuesday was the System Center Configuration Manager 2007: Desired Configuration Management session. This is a great new capability that allows you to monitor your servers to ensure they stay within a desired configuration state. This is not something that you can only monitor for Microsoft specific services / applications. You can define what the desired state is for any custom application that you have written yourself and have it monitored and "controlled". This is soooooo kewl!!! Since it was the end of a long day and my caffeine hit from my morning mocha had already worn off, I was a bit tired and drifted off a few times during the session. Because of this, I'm sure I missed a few key points, but overall, I can't wait for this either.
After the day's sessions, there are always parties that take place during the evenings. I decided to attend two such parties on Tuesday night at the Peabody and the Royal Plaza Hotel. I want to thank the Office and Unified Communications team for hosting these two parties and allowing me to attend and eat the great food provided. I ended up staying a little later than planned at the last party I was at (Royal Plaza Hotel) since they had a Galaga game and I really, really like that game.
Yet another great day came to an end and I will be writing another post tomorrow for Wednesday (today).
Harold Wong
harold.wong@microsoft.com