Microsoft TechEd North America
Today was the 2nd full day at TechEd here in New Orleans, with the conference only going from Monday thru Thursday this year, they’re packing in a week of content in just 4 days, and with a “full house” for attendees at this year’s conference, it’s great to be a speaker who gets starting room only crowds to sessions (I’d like to think it’s because of my session topics and the content I’m covering, but I’ve heard most sessions are pretty packed…) Getting a LOT of great questions this year, both during the Q&A section of my sessions as well as for the times I’ve been working the expo floor. Definitely this year’s attendees are serious about planning and preparing their deployment of new technologies, not just out kicking the tires. It seems like folks have come prepared and are ready to understand the new technologies and be ready when they get back to work to start getting their rollouts going… Today, I had a session on DirectAccess (Tips, Tricks, Best Practices) which was a full on demo session, start to finish I covered the topic, step by step install, and while things were churning on the configuration, I was able to explain why something is configured the way it is, and any of the gotchas for the configurations. Right after that session, I did a session on Hyper-V R2 integration with the System Center suite, including imaging server guest sessions using ConfigMgr, doing “rapid provisioning” in HyperV and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, monitoring systems using Operations Mgr, and using Opalis to automate the deployment, load balancing of resources, and operational data center uptime automation process. Now at the New Orleans Airport, heading back to California for a couple days of presentations and then back out on the road, non-stop…
