More evidence that e12 rocks

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Last week at Tech-Ed, I did demo duty for a series of meetings with various reviewers, showing off all the cool features that you'll be able to see in Exchange 2007 Beta 2. One of these meetings was with Paul Thurrott, during which we ran way over schedule, but I didn't want to stop because I was having a blast demoing all the fantastic ways you can use monad to manage exchange. Apparently it was time well spent, as Paul wrote in his latest set of "tidbits":

The new PowerShell (formerly code-named Monad) -based Exchange Management Shell (EMS) is sure to cause some palpitations, especially if you happen to be a UNIX old-timer. This is excellent stuff and surprisingly intuitive for a command line environment.

<pat self on back for demoing how intuitive and easy to use monad is in e12>

<pats the systems management team on back for giving people palpitations - that's a good thing, folks!>

It was interesting, because I walked into these meetings thinking that I had to show the reviewers how much GUI there was in exchange system manager (now called exchange management console or EMC) - our beta1 did not have a lot of GUI in it, and so there was a perception that you had to do everything via the cmdline, which was absolutely not the case. In the last coding milestone (after beta 1), we put a ton of GUI into EMC... so I wanted to show that off to the reviewers so they would realize that using the shell is not required, for administrators who aren't comfortable with it.

But as Paul saw the demos, he didn't seem at all worried about having enough GUI - within a minute it was quite obvious how much there was, and how clean and well organized it was. Instead, he drilled into concerns about the discoverability of monad, would non-programmers understand it, etc. Fortunately we have several key features that really help with discoverability of the cmdline and how to use it, as well as general ease of use of the cmdline.

I'll write up a blog post with an official demo script when I get a chance, and show y'all what I showed the reviewers... I didn't have an official script while demoing, because I just demo'd whatever the reviewers were interested in. I stole most of my tricks from our monad PM Vivek Sharma, anyway - check out his blog for more goodies.