Microsoft Tech.Ed On the Road 2009 !!!!! A Smashing Success !!!!!

Before the media and others start talking and raving about the event, let me put it this way – It was a SMASHING SUCCESS!

With over 100 attendees for the IT Pro tracks and close to 120 attendees for the Dev Pro Tracks, the event was all that it was hyped to be. Well, almost.

We were planning to give demos of the products we were presenting on, but unfortunately the venue management forbade us from bringing any of our own Hardware (read CPU’s) in the building as part of it is an IT Park (customs bonded), and they did not want anyone raising issues over the entry and exit of CPU boxes.

All said and done, I presented on Exchange 2010, its new features, comparison to previous versions of Exchange and Architectural differences, RBAC, Decision Engine like capabilities (Message Tips) and more, while Aviraj covered Windows Server 2008 R2 enhancements, Live Migration, Quick Migration, Windows 7 client and Virtualization 360.

The attraction of the day was the following Office Productivity video by Microsoft -

Apart from the IT Pro tracks, for Dev Pro, we had Vikram present and give demos on Silverlight, Dhaval demoing on ASP.net and Sarang Datye from Microsoft presenting and demoing on DotNet Framework 4.0.

Not forgetting the Volunteers who are fellow IT professionals, students, interns and more, I’d like to thank them for their support and help to make the event the success story that it has always been.

The best part for me in the session, was to meet fellow Infrastructure Architects and Exchange Admins who’ve been there and done that :), and to answer their queries regarding some issues / bottlenecks they were facing, or had apprehensions about.

I’ve gotten a goodly amount of feedback for the sessions, and the products as a whole, and am looking forward to getting more queries / bug reports / issues faced kind of info to pass on to the relevant people to work on.

I can be reached at abhishek.pradhan[at]puneusergroup.org for the same.

Also, last but not the least, I’ll try to arrange one Demo / Hands On session sometime in July or August for Exchange Server 2010 and Hyper-V Live Migration.