Tech Ed Rocks!
Now to Tech Ed...over 5,000 IT Professionals were at this annual conference, a small portion of whom were Irish! The keynote delivered by Brad Anderson, focused on the key to a 'Dynamic Enterprise in Changing Business Conditions' - this was ok...there were far more interesting and entertaining topics and speakers to follow during the week.
Lucky for you if you didn't attend the conference, you can actually catch the highlights on video @ https://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/itpro/. Some of the conference topline announcements worth mentioning are:
. New Windows Server 2008 R2 features: Live Migration; Branch Cache; DirectAccess; and Remote Desktop Services (RDS) - the new name for Terminal Services.
. System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta.
. Integrated Identity and Security Solutions - Identity Lifecycle Manager 2 RC and Intelligent Access Gateway SP2 (including virtualization appliance).
. "Dublin" - codename for a set of extensions to the Windows Server application server. "Dublin" will be delivered as a separate out-of-band release, downloadable for use by Windows Server customers; the first Customer Technology Preview (CTP) was delivered at last week's Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in October 2008.
My personal highlights were any of the sessions delivered by Mark Minasi (mostly Vista sessions) or Mark Russinovich - watch out for the session entitled 'The Case of the Unexplained'. These guys were brilliant presenters and actually managed to entertain as well as teach! I also hear Steve Riley's sessions earlier in the week were amazing. Again, check out the video highlights @ https://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/itpro/
For those of you particularly interested in Windows Server 2008, System Centre 2007 and Virtualisation – local Microsoft MVP Aidan Finn (System Center Configuration Manager 2007) did a stand-up job on blogging on the key infrastructure sessions during the week.