Greetings from Berlin

Hello again.  Right now, I’m in Berlin for TechEd EMEA 2009, which is really exciting as Monday was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It was also Day 1 of TechEd EMEA.  Despite a down economy, it’s a sold out show with over 7,000 people.  If you want to follow the show, you can do so virtually at the TechEd EMEA website.

Today, I did some interesting press interviews and spent most of the rest of the day talking to other attendees.  If you are actually at the show, come check out my session, SVR205, on Tuesday at 1330.  Jeff Woolsey and I will be covering Hyper-V and VMM overview.  Plus, I would love to get a chance to meet some people.

The keynote for the show was in the afternoon and it had two killer demos.  The first, was an incredible demo of Exchange 2010, which hit General Availability today and is ready for download.  Even though I’ve been on EX2010 and Outlook 2010 for a while, I learned several things from the keynote.  Plus, I can’t stop raving about the new Ignore thread features, which once and for all gets rid of the “Please don’t reply all or please remove me from this thread” e-mail threads we get this time of year.  The other demo was a great System Center demo by Jeff Wettlaufer, which really seamlessly brought together what the suite of System Center applications can do.

On the downside, yes, I didn’t really get the IT dream videos either.  And yes, there probably should have been more developer content.  Still, overall, I think the keynote (especially the demos) set a good tone for the show.

A couple more things from Berlin.  First, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@edwinyuen), as I’ll be actively tweeting from the show.  Second, we have another twitter contest.  This time, if you are a TechEd EMEA 2009 attendee, all you have to do is start following my close friend David Mills (@dmills_ms).  We will be giving away an Archos 5 PMP each day, winners coming from all of David’s new followers.  You can get more details on the contest here and here.  Finally, we have a new blogging contest with System Center.  Through our System Center Influencers program, we will be awarding $100 Visa gift cards each month for the next 6 months, to the best blogs related to that month’s topic.  Not part of the System Center Influencers program?  Just send e-mail to SCNETSUP@microsoft.com to join.  More details for this contest here.

That’s all from today!  I’ll write more tomorrow and if you are in Berlin, make sure to stop me if you see me for a chat!!