Monday, November 8, 2010

Tech-Ed Berlin 2010 – Day One

Phew! Day One of Tech-Ed Berlin 2010 is finished. Three and a half days to come. I have attended two Tech-Ed events before so I was about to think I know the drill.

But no! I don’t. Somehow, somewhere people made decisions which had serious effects on Tech-Ed in general and the Monday in particular. For starters, there were no sessions! Only pre-conference sessions but not the normal ones?! Many people stayed away from Messe Süd where Tech-Ed takes place which resulted in these rare sights:
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And:
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HELLO! ANY ONE THERE? Where is EVERYBODY?

Soon I figured it out: many had already collected their badges the days before and enjoyed Berlin. So it was really quiet. Secondly the bag of Goodies got some redesigning as well, which resulted in this pouch with advertisements, a T-shirt and a water bottle:
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But hey! I do not attend Tech-Ed for the bag of Goodies! No! I attend Tech-Ed for the sessions. But on Monday, there weren’t any normal sessions like the ones I came to be used to. So it felt a bit strange.

None the less, I attended a MVP only session (all NDA so I can’t say anything about it). Also met some other SCOM MVPs and had a good talk with the MVP Lead for SCOM, Justin Incarnato. Bumped into Daniel Savage, helped him with nailing a nagging SCOM issue :) and met Jason Buffington.

So before I knew it, it was Key Note time. Brad Anderson was on stage and presented the Key Note. Before he came on stage the Kinect was demonstrated. Bye Bye Nintendo Wii and HELLLO Kinect. Awesome! Its really something special!
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Soon the Cloud was mentioned and Brad compared today’s IT (every company running one or more datacenters of their own) with the days that companies generated their own electricity:
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But of course, today many companies will start moving to the Cloud where Microsoft has its presence which is still growing by the day:
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During the Key Note many Cloud based products and services were demonstrated: Office 365, Azure, newest edition of SCVMM in order to create new applications (aka Service Templates) which are carved into sections/partitions: the server application like SQL and or IIS, the app it self and the like. This way the app becomes OS independent. Very impressive.

Also Windows Intune (Cloud based monitoring solution for desktops and laptops) was demonstrated by a video recording. Also impressive.

Than W7 Phone was demonstrated. The SDK (free downloadable for anybody) was shown. And I must say, the W7 phone looks HOT! Would love to use it myself.
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Many demonstrations were given and much more was talked about: SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 was demonstrated (Remote FX and Dynamic Memory), SCOM in conjunction with AVICODE (monitoring DOT NET), SCOM in conjunction with a future edition (?) of the Azure MP, Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 was talked about, the IT environment becoming more and more user centric where virtualization plays a very important role, W7 Phone, soon available by 90 carriers in 40+ countries, half of a million downloads of the W7 Phone SDK, just to name a few!

The Key Note was fast paced and very interesting. Before I knew it, it was over and time for a drink.

Recap of Day One:
As a ‘regular’ Tech-Ed attendee I missed the ‘normal’ Monday where the usual Tech-Ed sessions could be attended. This reduces the effectiveness of the whole Tech-Ed event since everything has to be put into three and a half days since Friday won’t be used as a whole day. I hope that next year Tech-Ed 2011 will see a normal Monday again with sessions for ALL Tech-Ed attendees. Since I am a MVP I could meet up with many good friends so I could do other things. But my colleagues weren’t very happy since they really want to get ‘down and dirty’ with all kind of Geeky stuff only to find out they had to wait another whole day…

The Key Note was interesting with some cool demonstrations so it was time well spent.

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