March SBS users group wrap up

Wow - what a great meeting tonight. We had around 24 bodies in the boardroom at Sun Microsystems' office - was a little tight but that's all part of the fun.

I started with a brief introduction and welcome. Since there were some new faces amongst us, we then ran around the room giving our names. Perhaps I need to look at preparing some name badges for future meetings as the numbers increase and our memories are stretched!

Matthew Nolan (SA Branch Manager for Alstom IT) helped us thank Sun for hosting us and introduced Michael Jenkin (another SBS MVP) who gave us a brief overview of the Sun Fire V20z server he'd been playing with. This is a dual processor Opteron 1U rack mount server with room for 2 disks and up to 16Gb RAM. The report is it flies and runs SBS2003 flawlessly. No additional driver disks were required - it just installed (that's always great news). Michael was very impressed with the performance.

We then had a presentation from Ben Guthrie (Product Marketing Manger) from Trend Micro. Ben gave us an insight into some of the technologies Trend are looking to incorporate into future products. This presentation required the attendees to sign an NDA so I can't write anything more here except to say watch out for some amazing things from Trend later this year.

I also made mention of Harry Brelsford's visit to Australia next week when he will present in Sydney & Brisbane to other Microsoft partners.Some of the Adelaide group members are travelling over to Sydney for the day - it's great to see the willingness to go the extra mile (or the extra 1,000 miles) to learn more. Well done guys. This might be a precursor to SMB Nation in September (in Seattle, Washington) - we might get more than just 3 Aussies at the next one (look out for the Thunder from Down Under!!)

We finished the night with pizza and drinks courtesy of Alstom IT, who also arranged parking vouchers for us such that our parking was free. It's great to see the vendors and distributors getting behind the group and supporting us like this. - thanks guys.

Our next meeting will most likely be either April 18 or May 2nd (venue to be determined) so stay posted for an update, or you can join the group's Yahoo list to receive notifications in your Inbox (low traffic). We're going to be amazed by Peter Teichert (from SDM) with a presentation on Microsoft CRM.

Look forward to seeing you there.