Wellington Infrastructure User Group – 1st meeting 30 March

The Wellington Infrastructure User group announces the formation of a new NZ Microsoft user group, and holding its inaugural meeting on Monday 30th March.  Presentations start at 6pm

Location is Microsoft Wellington offices, level 12, 157 Lambton Quay, Wellington (Midland park)

 

Office Communications Server 2007 OCS

As part of the inaugural Infrastructure User Group, Terry Chapman from Fujitsu New Zealand will present on deploying Microsoft Enterprise Voice using Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging.  Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy has been steadily gaining momentum over the last 12 months and many organisations are now looking at technologies such as OCS to help deliver some of the cost savings being asked of IT by the business.

The presentation will have a practical delivery focus, including;

  • a quick overview of the technologies
  • ammunition for building a solid business case
  • architecting IM, presence, conferencing and Enterprise Voice for the NZ market
  • practical tips for deploying OCS 2007 and Exchange 2007 UM
  • lessons learnt from the field (or learning from someone else’s mistakes!)

There will also be some time at the end of the presentation to ask questions or contribute with your own experiences with this technology.

About the presenter: Terry Chapman (CISSP, VCP, MCTS, MCSE, FCNSP) is a Principal Consultant with Fujitsu New Zealand.  He leads the Unified Communications practice within Fujitsu NZ which has recently become a Microsoft Voice specialised partner along with being the first Microsoft partner in New Zealand to have deployed OCS 2007 R2 internally.  Terry works across most of Fujitsu’s customer base and has many years of experience with a range of clients in the public and private sectors both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

 

Hyper-V | The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

With the imminent release of Server 2008 R2, and the licensing benefits it can offer, Hyper-V is becoming an increasingly popular option for a virtualisation platform. As a result, the question Hyper-Vsystem implementers are being asked is “Hyper-V or VMWare?”

This presentation will discuss some of the key benefits of virtualisation, and how Hyper-V manages them when compared with VMWare – what it does well (the good), what it doesn’t do so well (the bad), and some of the traps that implementers and administrators can find themselves facing (the ugly).

We will also discuss some of the features of the soon to be release R2 and how they move Microsoft’s virtualisation offering ever closer to matching VMWare’s feature-set.

About the presenter: Julian Bee

A serial early-adopter and Microsoft advocate, Julian has spent several years in the trenches managing, supporting, and administering a range of server environments, with a principal focus on Microsoft solutions. In 2007, he lead the deployment of NZ’s first (and globally the second) Hosted Exchange 2007 with Unified Messaging platform leveraging the Microsoft Provisioning System interface for management. Has spent the last two years working with VMWare ESX server in both production and lab environments, and has been working with Hyper-V since its release last year. By his own admission, he is ‘mad for virtualisation’ and loves the opportunities it provides for infrastructure consolidation and management.