A busy few weeks downunder – ANZ tour update

You may have noticed I’ve been a little slack blogging lately.  Over the last two weeks I’ve been touring Australia and New Zealand – talking to SBSers and EBSers all over  the countries, listening, answering questions, and taking notes on what we can do to improve things downunder.  Being a native NZer myself I always find the ANZ leg of my travel especially interesting.  This was the proving ground where I ran my own SMB IT provider, so it’s always interesting to see how things have changed and what things haven’t.   Before I head off on vacation for the next few weeks I thought I would take some time to summarize what I talked about and publish some of the content I was talking about.

SBS Migration

Many of the people I spoke to had successfully carried out the migration but passed on some very valuable feedback.  Help us track where we are so if we walk away, or something comes up we’re able to track our progress. When I get back to Redmond one of the work items I’ll kick off will be a checklist to support the migration.  I’m still brainstorming what other cool things we can do with this checklist so that those working on SBS can customize it for their own needs.  Feel free to send me ideas using the contact me link to the right.

The EBS Planning and Preparation Wizard

One of the little gems of EBS is the P&P wizard.  Everyone I demoed this to could see some opportunity to use it in their practice.  As promised the download link is here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E3906025-00E3-407D-BF5B-99D546021923&displaylang=en

Windows® Essential Business Server (EBS) provides an integrated server and management system for businesses that have up to 300 users or computers. The Preparation and Planning Wizards help you prepare your environment and plan for deployment of Windows EBS, The Preparation Wizard scans your network environment and identifies issues that you need to correct to be able to deploy Windows EBS. The tool runs about 100 environment checks and provides data and documentation links to address the issues found. The Planning Wizard collects information about the network settings that you will need to install Windows EBS

Press and Analyst Interviews

I was lucky enough to talk to several local publications while I down, and even had the chance to do a podcast and a brief interview with an analyst.  Once I get the final print I’ll be sure to post them.

3 Hour Deep Dive Session

This is the session I ran in NZ both Thursday and Friday.  It was a lot of content crammed into a very short amount of time.  Those of you that attended gave me great feedback on the content, and I appreciate you taking the three hours to listen to me.  We covered pretty much everything in SBS, and covered topics in EBS from migration to coexisting mail configurations.  The slide deck can be grabbed from here http://cid-dfe7deafd9f0521f.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/ANZ%20Session%20Feb%2009.pptx

Local training labs and content feedback and update

While in Brisbane, Hilton and Stuart gave me feedback on the earlier RC0 labs, and some of the issues that were experienced.  In response I’ve kicked off the work to update the 3 days labs with RTM content.  We’ll also be including broader feedback that the guys gave me.  Watch this space for a update.  The updated content will be available in English to subs in the next two months or thereabouts.

Other conversation topics included; Solutions Pathway, Downgrade rights (SQL, Windows), Virtual machines, training simulators, migration to EBS, EBS market positioning, OEM bundles… as you can see we covered a lot!

Finally I wanted to thank all of you for coming along and spending time with me on Windows Essential Server Solutions.  I enjoyed the conversations, technical geek out sessions and feedback we got.  We’re in this business for SMB and there’s nothing better than for us guys from Corp to spend time in the field.  Also, thanks to Wayne, Tovia, and Robbie for the local support.  You guys made my trip a breeze.

I’m off on vacation from tonight, so the blog will be a little quiet until mid-March, but watch this space.  I have a big list of blog posts I want to get done!