Viva Exchange: Day 1

Untitled document

Exchange Connections begins today and I have to admit that nobody brings up high-rises faster than Las Vegas these days. I’m presenting three sessions at the Microsoft Exchange Connections 2006 event which is a part of the WinConnections.com (Dev/ASP/Office/SQL etc) family. I’m covering one on auditing, one on automating and one on managing Microsoft Exchange in an SMB environment. All sessions are very community focused and driven on best practices and experiences of running thousands of Exchange servers at OWN. But enough about me, more about the event:

The theme is “ready for a new day” and the show is packed with “Who’s Who” among Windows Server family experts, Microsoft employees and sharp folks in general. Even during the checkin yesterday someone showed me a demo of Windows CE 6.0 prototype running on the HTC Wizard. In short, my kind of crowd

2007 wave presence is huge here. I spoke to a few folks last night and we talked about how this was different from TechEd – in their words “they had better food at TechEd”; Then again, we are in Vegas, if you can’t find good food here you need help.

One surprise? Vendors are starting to look down…. it’s amazing. I was walking through the vendor hall last night and I nearly busted out laughing at the “EMC for SMB” banner. I am not slanting EMC a bit here, they have spectacular products and we have given many-a-firstborn to EMC over the years…. but their reputation does not go hand in hand with SMB at all.

So, thats about it… And a few pictures:

View from my room… thats the airport.