SBS Day 1: ’tis Good to be an MVP

What a day….

Well, TechEd day 1 has paid for the lost time & productivity that was sacrificed to attend. Many, many times over. Today was quite eventful and longer than I imagined but also very start-struck. First, I saw the keynote by David Thompson (whom I’ve met at last years TechEd) the head Exchange guy and the conversation was about where Unified Messaging worked. He obviously had many monkeys working on his presentation because it was the only one, whole day, that went on without a hitch. Then mo Exchange, I recruited Terry Constable (fellow part-time SBSer and full time SQL BI analyst) away from Scorecard Manager presentation and to an Exchange 2007 presentation by Terry Myerson under the premise of “why not see a presentation on a product that you’ll actually use” – awesome presentation. You have probably seen presentations by Terry before on the Microsoft Exchange blog but he pulled one PM after another to demo PowerShell, OWA, SharePoint integration, UM info and so on. Then off to Mike Fitzmaurice’s presentation on whats new in SharePoint, then also got to have dinner with him. Mike was described to me as the “spokesman” for SharePoint and a Technical PM but you can see the geekness – as a developer you can certainly appreciate people that debug live in front of others, great sense of humor too. Speaking of a good sense of humor, met Kevin Remde in person, finally – he’ll have a pic on his blog. Last presentation of the day I actually assisted Alex Nikolayev (owner of the huge SMTP part of Exchange and a whole lot more) on the antispam framework of all things. Thats a humbling experience I recommend to everyone – go stand next to the guy that developed every bit of code you use and then provide your implementation ideas.

After all the evets I got to volunteer in the unified messaging area and field questions. Of interest was my alma mater Exchange administrator talking about University of Florida’s final migration to Exchange (lets just say that UF migrating to Exchange is like it becoming a basketball school) – the hell in Gainesville is getting cold. Chatted with the sr. architect at Accenture about the concept of managing field consultant systems, chatted with a few hospital employees that need to customize IMF for a deployment on a system with 50,000 mailboxes, Martin Tuip from Quest about the how they deployed the archiving system in over 20 minutes for the entire company where their competitor spent 3 days on-site, and to top it off I went through the vendor showcase (searching for grub) and ended up meeting Vassil Terziev (CEO, Telerik) who in about 3 minutes saved me thousands of dollars on the AJAX development of Shockey Monkey… and gave me a free tshirt! Score!

Now I figured I could have said “That’s Hot” but I’m starstruck enough that I don’t need more Paris Hilton help   

SBS Spotlight

Not a newsflash but TechEd ain’t no SBSer event. I was answering a question for someone today on the WSUS junk filter updates and they were your usual SBSer questions – guy runs Exchange @ a major drink company with roughly 30,000 mailboxes under management. So different kind of crowd, different focus, just think different.

That said, I got to hang out with Susan Bradley today for a few minutes. Tomorrow Jeff is coming over so we’ll have our party here. You’ll definitely see the launch of the SBS Shirts 

Grove

Speaking of not for SBS, the grove solution is definitely not gonna be in the price or complexity range for your SBS shop. However, this is the kind of Technology that SBSers have a dire need. Think of SharePoint with integrated task and project management, with discussion groups, collaborative file sharing, integrated live messaging, secure replication and sharing – and an offline client. Dig that! Unfortunately the price and the complexity make it an unlikely part of the SBS network but we’ll work our ass off to make it affordable through Own Web Now.

Working with Microsoft Exchange

I volunteered to field questions in the Messaging booth for Microsoft. Shaming 2.0. Again, stick an outsider next to the person that was in charge of design, development, project management, promotion, marketing and delivery of a particular piece of code – and then answer another ITPRO’s question about that piece while they stand next to you. Forgive me for my geekness, but this is pretty high up there for my little world. Although I was there to answer questions the flow was a little slow so I was the one asking most of the questions – from the guys responsible for it.

And yes Chris, I thanked KC for the swag she sent you. Much prettier in person than on the blog.

Those of you that know me (and had the pleasure of seeing Vlad-built PowerPoint decks) will be happy to hear that I expressed my opinion and understanding of Microsoft PowerPoint to the guy responsible for it! Now, I didn’t know who he was before I shared my enthusiasm for Death by PowerPoint. Ooooooooooooooooof, never needed an undo in life that badly. Could have been worse, can you imagine my conversation with a Dynamics product PM?

MVP UM Party

Big big thanks to April Dalke (MVP Lead) for inviting me to the MVP party for Office/UM party. No shirts and software can top a free Lobster from Microsoft!

But MVP’s can. Got a new description of the MCSE acronym from Lee Mackey, hiring suggestions from Andy Webb, forum talk with Daniel Petri, see someone take the drink away from Missy Koslosky and get SharePoint migration ideas from Todd Bleeker. Finally met Andy David and Martin Blackstone, ironically enough, in a bar line. WOW. Talk about fair advertising!  

Todd Bleeker and me, didn’t catch the lobsters name. ‘tis good to be an MVP!