TechEd Day 2 – Meetings

Not a whole lot of pictures today, as I’ve spent pretty much the entire day in NDA meetings. What I can say is that all the big SMB concerns I’ve been getting from you folks over the years today were asked/begged for in the focus groups – things like ability to send mail and stamp it with any proxyAddress attribute, separate and custom GAL without the HMS tools, mailing list support, etc. This is not to say that you’ll ever see those feature in any future version of Exchange, just to let you know that the concerns have been brought up and people designing future versions of Microsoft Exchange are aware of them. As for what they’ll actually be bringing in the next version of Exchange, or the upcoming SP1…

On the more public side of TechEd, Joe Willcox has an overview of this mornings Windows Server 2008 announcements. Frankly, the focus on Windows Server 2008 is enormous and the amount of problems it solves (by itself) is really amazing. There are so many labs, sessions and theatre presentations on it that will really make your head spin – not to mention that this is a Beta 3 product. They are even giving away free Microsoft Press Windows 2008 Server books in the infrastructure booth, stop by and ask for one!

In terms of TechEd value.. so far.. I don’t know what you make per hour but so far TechEd has been able to save me at least 2–3 weeks of research that I would have had to do on my own. In less than a day and a half. Not to mention the connections with the people that actually write the software so I can ping them for help when I run into issues, seeing the tips and tricks from the guys (and gals) that actually wrote it. Yes, you’ll eventually get all of this online, and you will maybe be able to figure it out on your own… but there is only 24 hours in a day and I don’t have only Windows Server 2008 to support. Optimization.

By the way, the most impressive product so far (sans Windows 2008 / Exchange, though I’m biased) at TechEd is LCS. Live Communications Server integrates all the conferencing, IM, video, audio, livemeeting, federation, policy control, etc that you can ever need. Sure, it costs an arm, leg, a firstborn, deed to the house and the national debt of Mexico…. but that is why we have things like BitTorrent!

(no, I’m not telling you to pirate things, it’s a joke. everyone wants to be an attorney these days)