The last 2 days of Tech.Ed
At the moment I'm packing to depart from Amsterdam. Great city, great ambiance. Tech.Ed has ended now, but Microsoft didn't announce where will it be next year. I voted for Prague (hey, why wasn't Lisbon listed as a choice?).
Here are the news from the last 2 days, in what it matters to messaging. Some of the topics covered are really sexy, so you can expect some future posts about them, or maybe some articles.
Day 3:
• Best Practices for Disaster Recovery - Lessons Learned from Exchange 2003 Stretched Clusters Deployments - a great topic, during my experience at the Ask The Experts (ATE) I noticed that there is a great interest around the subject of geo-clustering. Exchange 12 will be great for the task, since it will support log shipping.
• Tech.Ed Party - As usual, Thursday night is party night. Scizzor Sisters and NU2, tribute bands to Scissor Sisters and U2, performed during the party. Not bad, but I think it could be better...
Day 4:
• Analysing Exchange Server 2003 with SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services - if after a party night, at 8:30 in the morning I didn't get sleepy it's because the session was damn good. It's wonderful the result we can get with Log Parser 2.2 and SQL Reporting Services.
• Exchange 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Based Backup and Restore - now I'm confused. A day before I was told that NTBackup was not VSS-aware, now this guy tells me it is. I'll definitely have to do more research on this...
The final evaluation is positive. What the conference lacks in more deep technical content (remember that this event is for all kind of people) it compensates with the opportunity to meet really experts in all Microsoft technologies.
I'll probably attend Tech.Ed 2006 if I can, but I think the really exciting event for next year will be IT Forum 06, because by that time there will be already some betas of Exchange 12.