Is this thing on? : Conferences

Why You Should Attend Tech·Ed North America 2009

Scott Schnoll — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:13:00 GMT

The Tech·Ed Web site has some great reasons as to why you should attend this year, but I thought I would add a few more:

Sessions, sessions, and more sessions. In case you haven't looked at the Session List, there's 738 technical sessions available.
Of the 738 sessions, 67 of them are Unified Communications sessions.
If you review the 67 UC sessions, you'll see titles like:

UNC204 Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Server "14"
UNC312 Archiving and Retention in Microsoft Exchange Server "14"
UNC313 High Availability in Microsoft Exchange Server "14" (this one is presented by yours truly)
UNC316 Microsoft Exchange Server "14" Architecture
etc., etc. (I think you know where this is going)

You'll also find several Hands On Labs, interactive instructor led sessions, and more!
If you need help convincing your boss that you should attend, we can help with that.
If you need help convincing your friends and co-workers to attend, we can help with that, too.

The future is coming, and you can see it at Tech·Ed North America 2009!

Microsoft Tech·Ed North America 2009 - Get On the Bus

Scott Schnoll — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:07:00 GMT

Hey MCPeeps,

Are you proud of your MCP status? Want to win a free trip to Tech·Ed North America 2009?

Microsoft Learning has launched an....well, I'm not sure what to call it <g>. Let's just say, they've launched an adventure like nothing you've seen before. It's called Get on the Bus.

Get on the Bus is an 11-day learning odyssey across the United States aboard the Career Express bus. The Career Express will travel from Tampa, Florida to Los Angeles, California, ending at Tech·Ed 2009! Each day of the trip, the Career Express will visit Microsoft Learning partners and IT Academies; meet with individuals, organizations, authors, and user group leaders; and hold Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) meet-ups along the way.

For more information about Get on the Bus, visit http://blogs.technet.com/mslcommunity/archive/2009/03/23/attention-bus-riders-now-boarding.aspx.

Tech·Ed Online

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:28:00 GMT

Microsoft Tech·Ed is our premier worldwide technical education conference for IT professionals and Developers. It's held annually in Australia, Brazil, China, Europe, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, North America, South Africa, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and it is chock full of Microsoft product and technology goodness.

If you can't make it to one of these events, there's also Tech·Ed Online. These are brief 10-20 minute technical talk videos featuring product, technology and subject matter experts. I recently presented one on Exchange Server 2007 SP1 with my colleague, Andrew Ehrensing, where we chatted about migration, transitions, and virtualization.

You can find other tech talk videos at the Portal page and the Library page.

Back From TechEd IT Pro North America 2008

Scott Schnoll — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:54:00 GMT

What a week! It was a very busy week for me in Orlando. I delivered two sessions: Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Tips & Tricks, and Advanced Troubleshooting Strategies for Exchange Server 2007. Both sessions went really well, and based on the scores and attendee comments, it looks like almost everyone was very satisified. Some folks did leave very bad scores because they were turned away due to the rooms being full. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the local fire marshall, such that when a room reaches capacity, we simply cannot let any more people in. If you were one of the folks who could not attend the session because the room was full, please let me know. If we have enough folks who could not get in, I'll see if I can arrange a Live Meeting Webcast repeat of the sessions so that you can still get the content.

In my previous blog post on TechEd, I mentioned I would be making a major product announcement at the end of my Tips & Tricks session. For those of you who could not attend, I announced that Microsoft will be providing a VSS-based plug-in for Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2008 that will enable customers to take Exchange-aware, VSS backups on Windows Server 2008. I don't have a lot of details to share beyond this. For those of you who might not know what the issue is, please see http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/03/05/448338.aspx. In short, NT Backup was replaced with Windows Server Backup (WSB) which unlike NTbackup, did not support ESE streaming backups of exchange. While WSB supports backup/recovery of any application including 3^rd party apps using VSS and a plug-in model, for reasons outside the control of the Windows or the Exchange team, the out-of-box-experience of Windows Server 2008 did not include the support for backing up and recovering Exchange. Both the Windows and the Exchange team heard a lot of feedback and criticism over a decision that neither team was responsible for. As a result of the large amount of feedback we received on this issue, we have decided to ship a plug-in for WSB created by Windows and the Small Business Server (SBS) team that enables VSS-based backups of Exchange. I would like to also publicly acknowledge the tireless and wonderful efforts of Nino Bilic, who, among several others, was responsible for driving the efforts on the Exchange team to find a solution to this issue for our customers. Nino, who constantly does amazing work for our customers, did some extra-amazing work here, and we all thank him very much for his efforts. I would also like to thank the Windows, and SBS teams for all of their dedicated hard work on the plug-in, as well as their tireless efforts to address customer requests and concerns.

I'd also like to thank Bharat Suneja, who worked with me on developing some very cool PowerShell scripts which parse the Agent logs on an Edge Transport or Hub Transport and do useful things with the data. I demonstrated these scripts in my Tips & Tricks session. Some examples of what you can do include taking malicious sender addresses and adding them to the blocked sender list. We also developed scripts that take offending IP addresses from the Agent logs and add them to the IP Block List. Finally, I demo'd our script which takes these same IP addresses and adds them to a DNS zone that is used to host an internal DNS block list. Bharat, who recently joined the Exchange UE team, will be posting these scripts on his blog soon.

Despite the thunderstorms and high humidity, TechEd IT Pro North America 2008 was a lot of fun and a great success.

Microsoft TechEd IT Pro 2008

Scott Schnoll — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Next week, I'll be presenting two sessions at TechEd IT Pro in Orlando:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Tips & Tricks This is the ever-popular session where I provide a couple dozen tips/tricks on various aspects of Exchange 2007. Since Exchange 2007 has been out for a while now, it's getting harder and harder to come up with new content. But I am confident that there will be plenty in the deck that will be new for all attendees. If you're attending TechEd, you'll want to come to the session (June 11, 2:45PM-4:00PM in Room N220 D), as I have some cool demos planned, as well as a major announcement regarding Exchange 2007.
Advanced Troubleshooting Strategies for Exchange 2007 This is an enhanced version of a session I did at Microsoft Interact earlier this year. In this session, I'll talk about some specific troubleshooting areas that generate a lot of support calls to CSS, and I'll show you some very advanced ways of troubleshooting issues with Exchange 2007.

If you can't make the sessions, but you're at the show, stop by the Exchange Server booth and say Hi!

Hope to see you there!