I thought I would start off with a picture of Cliff Chao with some people on the Expo Hall floor.  Cliff is the one with the small head.  :)

Here is another picture of Boston from the Convention Center.

One thing I like about going to Tech-Ed is seeing what we tell the public.  A lot of the stuff they talk about has been internal knowledge and I like to tell others about it, but can’t.  Once the beans are spilled at Tech-Ed, its fair game though.

Some things overheard that are just a little funny:

·         “Do more with more” – This was a line that Mary Lynn Rajskub from “24” fame said.  She was there Sunday night.  She did a good job.

·         “How many of your users are asking for less mailbox space?” – Steve Tramack (HP) 

·         “IT jokes are stooped.” – a note that was passed around during one of the sessions.  It kept getting brought up when lame jokes were presented.

·         “It is just so hard to find good Speedos anymore.” – Don’t ask.

ESRP session:

I went to a presentation where Matt Gossage spoke.  I knew him as the Exchange performance “go to” guy.  If you wanted to know anything about how to speed up Exchange, he was most likely the guy you wanted to talk about since he was a tester.  Now he is a PM for the CXP group.  CXP stands for Customer eXPerience.  Matt was talking about ESRP (Exchange Solution Reviewed Program).  This was the first time I had heard of it even though it was announced late 2005.

ESRP is a program where partners test their solutions for SANs and they then submit it to the Microsoft Product Group for review.  It gets checked for completeness and then they submit the results for you to view.  Why is this so cool?  Because configuring and testing a SAN with Exchange can be very difficult. 

Take a look at the solutions listed there.  There are solutions for 2000, 4000, 6000, and even 40,000 mailbox environments that have been tested.  Can you imagine how much work you would have to do to test a 40,000 mailbox setup?  And the great thing is that a lot of these solutions are designed to be “bricks”.  If you have a 12,000 mailbox environment you could use 2 of the 6000 mailbox solutions together.

A beta build of Jetstress 2007 will be released in July of 2006.  It will be 64 bit.

For testing you can use these tools:

• Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (EPA) – This looks at your databases to allow you to create a profile of your environment.
• System Center Capacity Planner 2006 – Using the profile from EPA you can plan deployments of Exchange 2003.
• Jetstress – This stresses your SAN as Exchange would. 

Documentation on Storage performance:

• Optimizing Storage for Exchange 2003 – Newly updated to include:
  • The number of items in a folder affects performance.
  • The number of mailboxes on a server affects performance.
  • The number of databases on a server affects performance.
  • Single Instance Storage and Exchange 5.5 upgrades.
  • Blackberry impact on storage
  • User Profiles
• Exchange Server 2003 Performance and Scalability Guide
• Troubleshooting Exchange Server 2003 Performance -or just run the Microsoft Exchange Server Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer Tool (EXPTA)

More to come...

It’s been 3 days since I got here and I finally have gotten around to writing an update.

Sunday:

It took no less than an hour to get from the hotel to the convention center.  I am not kidding.  SUNDAY!!!  It’s not even a work day.  Why is traffic so bad here?

I got registered.  Here is a picture of the bag, since I know you are wondering...

What swag is in it?  The usual stuff: magazines, CDs, a few DVDs.  What DVDs?  Beta 2 versions of Office System 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Groove Server 2007, Office Project Server 2007, Windows Vista (x86 and x64) and Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn”.

After checking in, I went to dinner only to look at the schedule and realize that the Keynotes were that night from 7:00 to 9:30.  That was not what I expected. 

Some things that I picked up from the Keynotes:

MaaS – This was a new acronym for me.  It means “Management as a Service”  Not sure how common that acronym is since I only saw it was listed 4 times together on Google.  I’m proud to say that Live.com found it more often than that.  It also contained more recent blog entries on it.  Way to go guys!!!  Back to MaaS – Exchange Hosted Services and the newly announced Forefront Client Security Services are examples of this.

The next version of Microsoft Operations Manager will be called System Center Operations Manager.  MOM just sounds better than SCOM, don’t you think?  “MOM takes care of my Enterprise” has a nice ring to it.  I’ll stop there.

Bob Muglia spoke of 4 Promises –

1) Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility – Bingo!  (kidding) 

• We are looking to do Virtualization at three levels: Hardware, OS and Application.
• I think I heard that Softricity (another acquisition intent) allows you to run two versions of Office on one desktop.
• There was a demo of the Virtual Machine Manager (in Longhorn?) that allows you to dynamically hot add memory and CPUs to your Virtual servers.
• Another demo: There is a wizard you can run to migrate a Physical server to Virtual Server.
• System Center Operations Manager will have a task to add more memory to a Virtual Server instance if needed.  You can even have it done automatically.
• Deployment of Vista is better with a System Image manager that allows you to see the components of an image and modify them.
• SMS allows you to run an inventory of your machines to find out what machines you can deploy Vista on.

2) Protect Information, Control Access

• Windows Update allow 250 Million computers to be updated within 72 hours of patch release.
• Forefront was mentioned again.  You can find information about it at http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/default.mspx .  It seems like a Suite of products that include Antigen for Exchange, SharePoint and Microsoft Client Protection.
• I heard that Antigen for Exchange removes only the infected files from zip files and lets the clean files through.  That was nice to know.
• Antigen for SharePoint recognizes when you rename a file so that it’s extension is different and will still block it if that attachment type is not allowed.

3)  Advance the Business with IT Solutions

• The Products that do this are Visual Studio and Expression.  I’m not a developer, so this was over my head.

4)  Amplify the impact of your People

• Outlook Voice Access (OVA) – New to Exchange Server 2007.  This is the ability to check your email over the phone.  Actually it does more than that.  Evidently there is a lot of buzz over this.  In the spirit of being “Honest and Respectful”:  I’m not sure I would use this, but I suppose that there are those that would love to have this.  It looks innovative to me which I am very happy to see.  The speech recognition of the product seems good.  The voice also sounds very good.  I just hate to have people reading to me.  I like to read too much.
• The future of search allow us to search the intranet and find content and then sort it by the writer’s Social relevance to me in the company.  That way I can find data that is more relevant to my job.  I’ve used this, and it is very interesting.
• I heard the term Wiki again.  On a side note: I used to live in Hawaii and when I lived there my roommate and I used to say “wiki wiki wiki” every time we saw the Wiki Wiki buses at the Airport.  Turns out that is where the term Wiki comes from.
• Slide Library – This was spoken of by Bill Gates in 2005, but this was the first time I saw this.  It is part of SharePoint which along with Powerpoint 2007 allows you to do a search of your PPT library for that one Slide that you need to add to your own slide deck.  Then you choose to add it. 
• Over 600K laptops are lost every year?  Bitlocker would be helpful in those instances.  Some estimates from other companies put this at 1-2 Million.

Well that is it for Sunday.  I’ll add some more later.

Just a note to let everyone know that I'll be at Tech-Ed 2006 in Boston.  I'll be there with one of my favorite customers from Healthcare and Life Sciences.  Go ahead and email me if you would like to meet up for lunch or something.  The more the merrier.  As Starsky says:  "No, seriously, come on, do it. Do it. "

There are some "new" or updated tools up on the Exchange 2003 download site. 

1. Exchange MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1
   Ok, not a tool.  But it is interesting to note that this got posted.  As the site says: "Starting with the Beta 2 release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, neither the Messaging API (MAPI) client libraries nor CDO 1.2.1 are provided as part of the product. The result is missing functionality that many server applications depend on. This tool provides access to these APIs, thereby providing access to the contents of the Exchange store and Active Directory."  Expect to learn more about this later. 
2. Jetstress (English only)
   This has been updated with some fixes.
3. MAPI Editor (English only)
   The filename still is MFCMAPI.exe but now it is called MAPI Editor.  Stephen Griffin calls it the "next version of MFCMAPI".  Makes sense.
4. Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool, Version 2.7
   Even more rules...  When will it ever end?  Hopefully never.  Wouldn't it be great if this was just part of the product?  <wink>  That would be so cool.
5. Profile Analyzer (English only)
   Updated version.  Also known as EPA.  Read about it here.
6. Public Folder DAV-based Administration Tool (English only)
   Updated version.  Use it a lot. 
   
   And...  Drumroll please......
   
7. Quota Message Service (English only)
   This is now officially supported by Microsoft.  Yay!  Oh wait, that's me.