Here’s what I collected on Day 4:

• Screaming Pig – Microsoft SilverLight

My first session was “SIA309 – Secure Endpoint – What’s in Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010” up in 388. We’ve been using Forefront Client Security for quite a while, and I was interested to find out some more details about the much delayed replacement. I came away pretty excited and eager to get my hands on the early bits. The addition of CPU throttling is a big win, as we often receive complaints from our users that FCS has started a scan and is impacting performance right when they need to get something ready for class. The addition of “sequencing” to its behavioral analysis will help catch things that are getting past FCS today. While individual events may look safe to the scanner, by looking at the events as a sequence, the combination of events can indicate a malware attack.

Forefront Endpoint Protection will also be better able to access updates as needed and automatically upload malware samples. The Dynamic Signature Service will go a long way towards shortening the cycle between new variants of malware and the release of updated signatures. Lastly, Dynamic Translation is a new feature that translates code from accessing actual resources to only using virtual resources, allowing Forefront to keep your system safe while it analyzes the behavior of the software it is scanning.

Next it was on to more Forefront family content in “SIA325 – Secure Endpoint: Virtualizing Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway.” This session was heavy on PerfMon analysis to monitor the load on your TMG server to determine whether virtualization will work. They showed an interesting table that listed each feature of TMG and the relative CPU and I/O hits from each one. Malware scanning was far and away the biggest impact on the system which is why they recommend placing the volume used for scanning on its own LUN and away from other activity. I have a feeling that our load would be well-suited to virtualizing, but I’ll need to look into it some more when I have time (as if that will ever happen!). The presenter offered to provide the data and PerfMon settings from the presentation, so I stopped by the booth and had it copied to my thumb drive.

I asked (at the booth, not during the session) whether they had considered adding multiple scanning engines in TMB, and he said that they had, but they didn’t feel the performance impact justified the benefits of the additional engines.

I ran into the guys from Med School so I had lunch with them (and apparently missed quite the discussion over at the Krewe table) before heading off to a meeting with @TechEd_NA, @expta, and @thekrewe. We had an interesting conversation about the event in general, the value of community at TechEd, and the phenomena that is The Krewe.

After the discussions, most of us were going to go to the Russinovich session, so we hung out for a while before heading down to the Auditorium. Even though we had met earlier in the week, @TiffanyWI hadn’t connected that I was @Ladewig until we were standing there waiting around. Since I use my last name for my Twitter name, anyone who looked at my badge knew right away who I was on Twitter. So that earned me a big hug and added another person to a growing list of friends thanks to Twitter, TechEd, and the Krewe.

Anticipating a packed house for “WCL315 – The Case of the Unexplained, 2010: Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich”, we headed down to Auditorium B early. That turned out to be a good decision because we managed to be near the front of the line and secured decent seats once the room opened. Mark was in great form as always as he walked us through a number of puzzling problems. As he showed us how to use several Sysinternals tools to identify the causes of the problems, he managed to get in a number of digs at Microsoft, Outlook, and Google. How does a guy get to be that funny and so wicked smart? If you haven’t been to one of his sessions, make an effort to do so the next time you’re at a conference where he is presenting. Absolutely amazing!

With our brains just a little bit more full than before, it was time for everyone to leave the Convention Center for the last time and say good bye to the educational part of TechEd for 2010. I headed back to the hotel, changed clothes, and killed some time before heading down to the lobby to catch the bus to the Closing Party.

The Closing Party (used to be the Attendee Party in previous years) was at Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World. This place is a little bit hard to describe. Blaine Kern Studios creates floats, sculptures, and props, and entire parades for Mardi Gras, Universal Studios, and other locations around the world. Mardi Gras World encompasses the actual sculpture and prop studios where they do their work with huge and unique event spaces. Check out their web site to learn more.

I arrived at the party just before the doors opened, so I was one of the first people in. At first you walked into a huge warehouse between rows of sculptures from various floats and then past entire floats from which costumed people were throwing beads. I collected several, enough to make myself look festive, and then walked through the area and the out into the open space along the river. Here they had a number of tents setup with food stations. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, and I had had enough food to tide me over for the evening. As it was still quite warm outside, I moved into the indoor area and found @TiffanyWI and then @wcaubrey. The band from the opening Keynote, Rockin’ Dopsie, Jr. and the Zydeco Twisters, was playing there, so we found a table for us and @expta. At the same time, the rest of the Krewe were securing tables in the Grand Oaks Mansion area, so we eventually moved over there where it was a bit cooler and a little more relaxed.

If you’ve ever been to the Blue Bayou at Disneyland, the Grand Oaks Mansion area is very similar with a replica antebellum mansion under a night sky with walkways and courtyards under moss-draped trees. Very cool. We managed to carve out our own area and spent the rest of the evening hanging out and enjoying everyone’s company on our last night together listening to a Dixieland-style band play.

After a lot of photos, hugs, and promises to stay in touch, people started to disperse. I left around 11 PM and headed back to the hotel. It was pretty late as usual, so I decided to save the packing for the morning and get some sleep.

Here’s what I collected on Day 3:

That’s correct… Absolutely Nothing!

This is the first time in many years that I didn’t visit the Expo and didn’t come back with some swag.

My first session on Wednesday was “WCL317 – Troubleshooting Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Lite Touch” with Johan Arwidmark. I just upgraded our BDD 2007 system to MDT 2010 a week or two ago, so I figured this would be a handy session to attend. Johan is one of those TechEd rockstars, not quite Russinovich-level rockstar, but close to that for deployment folks. He didn’t disappoint. I haven’t run into the scenarios he described, but if I do, I’ll have a hint as to what to look for. If you’re deploying Windows 7 (or even Vista and XP if you really want to still be doing that) and you aren’t using SCCM or MDT 2010, check it out. It gives you a great framework for adding some discipline to your deployment process. Being able to generate consistent gold images for your desktops pays big dividends when you have to support the systems where you deploy those images. I shudder to think of the way I used to build images. I won’t even describe it here to save myself public embarrassment.

Session 2 was “WSV316 – Hyper-V and Storage: Maximizing Performance and Deployment Best Practices in Windows Server 2008 R2” which is probably the longest session title of any I attended. I was a bit disappointed by this one. The speaker really focused on iSCSI over Fibre Channel, and since we don’t use iSCSI, a lot of the technical details didn’t hold my attention. I’ll take another look at the session later and see if I missed anything.

I managed to sneak in a quick lunch with some of the Krewe before I had to run to an 11:45 session. The lunch menu was pretty good. The catfish sticks had some seasoning to them and the mac & cheese was quite good. The red velvet cake was decent, considering that it was sugar-free.

The lunch session was “COS207 – Microsoft Live@edu: Moving Your School Communication and Collaboration to the Cloud” all the way in the back in Room 298. As I told some people at the time, I think I passed a sign that said “Welcome to Mississippi” on the way it seemed so far. We’ve moved our students to Live@edu already, just finishing up this month in fact, so I was more interested to hear what other schools are doing. A gentleman form the Kentucky school systems was the customer presenter, and he gave an interesting presentation of their migration. They moved all of their users, not just students, and had some different concerns than we did since they’re K-12 and we’re Higher Ed. I was interested to see the portal they developed in-house to simplify some of the management tasks that they can delegate to other users. I’m hoping our central IT does something similar for us to use.

Then it was on to “VIR320 – Sequencing Deep Dive: Efficiently Making Your Applications Virtual” to help prep for some App-V sequencing I need to do when I get back to the office. I actually went to this session last year, if I recall, but I never had time to move our App-V deployment forward, so I figured a refresher was in order. The presenter was a bit dry, but definitely knew his stuff. This was a much better App-V session than the one I attended previously. At the end of the presentation, he highlighted a new App-V community site that is available for Microsoft and the community to use to share recipes for sequencing apps. I haven’t visited it yet, but plan to do so when I get home.

It was back to MDT 2010 at 3:15 for “WCL403 – Unleash the Power of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010” with Michael Niehaus, another one of the deployment rockstars. Mike’s demos were a bit rocky due to network issues getting back to Redmond. I can’t imagine relying on network connectivity to be present for a demo for TechEd, especially when you can get a laptop with eSATA and a big external drive to hold your VMs. I’m just saying. Even without some of the demos, the session was still great however. He showed how to test and debug the modifications you make to MDT 2010 without having to actually lay down an image on a machine. That’s the worst part of making changes, and shortening that cycle will be a huge bonus.

I closed out the day with the 5 PM session “UNC315 – Microsoft Communications Server 14: Setup and Deployment.” There were three key takeaways from this session. First, with v14, Microsoft will support virtualization for all roles, including audio/video which isn’t the case with 2007 R2. Key will be the guidelines they provide for your configuration to ensure everything works as expected.
Second, SQL Server 2008 R2 will not be supported until after RTM, as part of some post-RTM update. That was unfortunate to hear as people want to start standardizing on R2 today. Instead you’re going to wind up with more SQL systems and clusters than you would need if you were only looking at your performance requirements.

Lastly, when you are in a coexistence mode with 2007 R2 and 14 running side-by-side, 14 will use a 2007 R2 Edge Server. Unlike Exchange which had you start upgrading from the outside and work your way in, with OCS you will start from the inside and work your way out.
Then it was back to the hotel where I discovered that housekeeping had “helpfully” raised the thermostat from what I had it set to. That really annoyed me. I understand I had it set a bit lower than they would like, but if you’re going to give me a room with two exterior walls in the heat and humidity of New Orleans, I want to make sure the room stays comfortable.

The main event in the evening was the Springboard party at House of Blues. Food was OK, nothing fancy, but was sufficient to keep the stomach from growling. The Krewe had gathered on the upper level overlooking the stage. Before the music started, most folks were watching the Stanley Cup final. I like the Blues and Kings, and since neither was playing, it didn’t really matter much to me who won. As everyone knows the Blackhawks went on to win the Cup that night, and that was OK with me. I like to see teams come back from long droughts in championships, so good for them.

The band that was playing the party that night was Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience. Terrance Simien is a Grammy-winning, Creole singer, and they brought down the house. I applaud the Springboard folks for their entertainment choice. I think everyone there that night would agree. And being the Disneyphile that I am, I was excited to hear them play “Gonna Take You There” from the Princess and the Frog soundtrack. Terrance did not sing on the soundtrack, but so here tonight and did a great job. I loved Princess and the Frog and really think it was underappreciated during its release. Be sure to check out the Terrance Simien web site. If you enable pop-ups for the site, you’ll get to listen to some his music.

I detoured to Krystal again on the way back to the hotel for a late night food fix. Made things interesting by adding a spicy chicken sandwich this time. Quite tasty.

Here’s what I collected on Day 2:

• T-Shirts (3) – Microsoft Office 2010, Microosoft Office Communications Server 14, Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration (book promotion)
• Books (2) – Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration (autographed!), Windows PowerShell 2.0
• Silly Putty – NetApp
• Baseball Cap – Another Windows Phone 7 cap
• Foam Channel9 Guy – Microsoft MSDN Channel9
• Foam Monster – TechSmith
• Foam Race Car – AdminStudio

Sessions started at 8 AM on Tuesday, so it was going to be a full day of technical overload.  I made a last minute substitution to go to MGT204 – Opalis IT Process Automation: Introduction and Technical Overview to learn more about the newest member of the System Center family.  Overall the session was informative, but it could have been shortened somewhat to make room for some more demos.  The speakers wanted to show how Opalis can help a hapless Help Desk worker be more effective through automation.  They made their point, but the video was twice as long as it needed to be. Thankfully, the “after” video showing how much better Opalis made things was quite short.

Opalis does look like a useful tool, albeit one heavily leaning towards integration with systems like Remedy.  The recency of its acquisition by Microsoft is evident by the number of integration points with other System Center products that are still under development.  I was hoping for some more general automation building blocks, but we can probably make it work for us.  There may be better automation engines out there, but we already license this through our other System Center licenses. Add another one to the To-Do list.

My next session was a bit of a bust.  VIR209 – Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 and Microsoft Office 2010 appeared to be focused on using App-V to virtualize Office 2010.  No it actually turned out to be a session about App-V and Office 2010 as separate products.  They may have eventually discussed the combination, but I didn’t stay that long.  Instead I headed over to the Hands-On Lab area to do some App-V labs.

Lunch was an improvement over the previous day with BBQ pork sandwiches and sides.  Not as good as Pappy’s back home in St. Louis, but not bad for conference food.

After lunch, I was at VIR304 – Hyper-V and Dynamic Memory in Depth and you might already see the problem.  Even if you don’t know anything about the topic, you can probably guess it is going to be pretty technical and somewhat dry.  If so, you’d be 100% correct.  I found myself nodding off for the first half hour or so, as my body told me it wanted to digest lunch and not listen to anything about Hyper-V.  However, the session was quite good and I eventually came out of food coma.  The speaker gave a very good explanation about this new feature and what it does for us, and more importantly, what it doesn’t do.  His comparison between the approaches used by VMware and Microsoft was enlightening.  Dynamic memory isn’t about using more memory than is present on your host.  Rather it is about using your memory more efficiently, letting the guest systems decide how much they need.

Next up was DAT205 – Microsoft SQL Server Consolidation and Virtualization: Myths and Realities but this wasn’t a technical deep dive. The 200-level designation is evident of that, but the speaker made it clear this was more about identifying the problem you are trying to address and how virtualization may or may not be the right decision.  It was interesting, I didn’t agree with his argument that blades weren’t appropriate for SQL server consolidation.  To each his own….

I skipped the last session of the day at 5 PM.  There wasn’t anything that was especially compelling, and I was ready to head back to the hotel room and rest up a bit.

Why did we need to rest? Well, my dance card that evening was quite full with three different events to go to.  The evening began with a quick visit to Tommy’s Wine Bar, just around the corner from the hotel.  KnowledgeLake, a St. Louis document imaging system vendor, was the host, and my colleagues from the Med School had obtained wrist bands for us to attend.  We’re not customers at the Business School, but the University is.  The food was quite good with several different seafood items offered.  The giant crab cakes were really good.

After about half an hour I headed into the French Quarter to Molly’s for the Xiotech Happy Hour.  Tommy, @StorageTexan, was our gracious host, and it was a great event.  The place is a hole in the wall, but quite cozy, and they had veggies, chips and salsa, and the fixings for sandwiches. Very casual and low key.  I met Hector from NCL, and learned quite a bit about a cruise line on which we’ve never sailed.  As you probably already know, give me an opportunity to talk about cruising, and you’re going to have a hard time getting me to stop!  I also spoke with people from some other Higher Ed institutions who were there.  It is always interesting to find out how other people in our industry look at problems and the solutions they put in place to address them.

Then it was back to the area by the hotel for the infamous Double-Take ClusterFunk at Republic.  As you may recall, we couldn’t get into the Republic last night because it was full.  I don’t know how many people were there that night, but on Tuesday, the place was packed.   What made the event even better was the exclusive VIP area reserved for The Krewe.  Eventually the whole second floor became the Krewe area, but it was quite nice to walk past the ropes and sit in some comfy couches to listen to the great music coming from the floor below.

Eventually I had to head back to the hotel as my body begged for some rest.  Three events in one night like this is quite unusual for me, so I skipped writing this up in order to get right to bed.  Of course, as I write this on the following night, I’m in the same position of really needing to get to bed if I want to make it to my 8 AM session.

Here’s what I collected on Day 1:

• T-Shirts (5) – Xiotech, Microsoft Windows Server (100% Geek), Diskeeper, Allure Bays Corp (hideous Keynote shirt), Internet Explorer
• Baseball Cap – Windows Phone 7 (repalced the Windows Mobile hat of years past)
• Spiral Notepad – Windows Embedded
• Can Cozy (2) – Idera, Boson
• Pen – Weird unfolding pen from Shavlik
• Flashing Rubber Ball – Windows Embedded
• Pedometer – Microsoft Business Intelligence
• Foam Muscle Arm – Microsoft Fix it (strangest foam toy ever)
• Flashing Ice Cube – Microsoft Services
• Rubber Mardi Gras Duck – GeekFest
• Plush Toys (4) – Screaming Monkey – Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Raccoon – MDOP, Koala – MDOP, Pilot Bear – Mimecast (cutest plush swag ever)
• Lip Balm – Windows 7
• Book – Cloud COmputing for Dummies – Microsoft

Given the quality of breakfasts at previous TechEds, it was an easy decision to have breakfast at the hotel. You can’t beat a made-to-order omelet in the morning with crispy bacon on the side. And from what I read on Twitter, the Convention Center didn’t even try. I’m not sure what went down, but people seemed really disappointed in what was offered.

After breakfast, I didn’t want to walk to the Convention Center and be dripping wet when I get there, so I rode the bus, the well air-conditioned bus to be exact. Arriving sweat-free, I lined up for the keynote and for once had a decent seat: pretty close and right on aisles so I could make a quick escape. They warmed up the crowd with a zydeco band, and it helped wake everyone up and get people as jazzed as they can be at a TechEd keynote.

Bob Muglia was his usual self. I’ll give him credit for keeping things on time and having a lot of demos, but I swear if he said cloud one more time I was going to lose it. And what is up with that hideous shirt they distributed on the chairs. I have no idea what the company on the shirt does and the shirt didn’t help solve that mystery. Going straight into the Goodwill pile.

Lunch was OK. The gumbo was decent enough, and the meatloaf wasn’t inedible. It definitely was bland. Not at all the “cajun” meatloaf that was on the name tag. Others on Twiteer disagreed and weren’t happy with the meal at all. I sympathize with the Convention Center since it is hard to cook for thousands of people and have it come out fresh and delicious every time. Now on to the sessions for today:

WPH201: Windows Phone 7: a New Kind of Phone

Good overview of the phone, the thought behinds the big changes in the Windows mobile platform, and where they are going. Kind of strange to be listening to the presentation while reading the announcements being made by Steve Jobs at the same time at WWDC. I like most of what I see, but the problem is they should have released this phone ages ago. I fear an end-of-year release may be too late.

MGT203 Microsoft System Center Roadmap and Strategy

This session was a look at the plans for the System Center suite including the v.Next products. It is amazing how much the System Center family has grown and how much the products have matured and continue to mature. SCCM 2007 will be the first Microsoft product to reach an R3 release. Highlight for me was the look at Forefront Endpoint Protection management, all of which will be handled in SCCM with the next release.

UNC320 Microsoft Communications Server 14: What’s New in Microsoft Communicator 14 Experience and Backend

The new Communicator client is a far cry from the current 2007 release. Very streamlined and information-rich, Communicator looks to both SharePoint and AD for user data. Photos and skills come from MySites, org charts from AD, etc. Since we aren’t using MySites currently, that added capability wouldn’t do much for us, but down the road, I can see how it would be useful. The client has a bit of a Facebook feel to it with the listing of status/presence changes for your contacts. Not sure if that is good or bad. Would be more helpful in large companies like Microsoft where not everyone may know each other. Less applicable to us at the school level, more so at the campus level.

After the sessions ended for the day, I made my way to the Partner Expo and grabbed some food and made the rounds. Not bad, but just typical appetizer food, albeit with a local twist. After visiting a few more vendors and Microsoft stations, I met up with some guys from the Med School and went to Gordon Biersch with them for dinner.

After dinner, I met up with some of The Krewe at the Exchange Roundtable at the Rusty Nail. It was a little hard to hear everyone, but there was a good discussion before it broke up into side groups. The Microsoft folks who attended were a great resource. Direct access to these folks is always the best reason for coming to TechEd. Thanks for setting this up Jeff!

Everyone rolled out of there around 11 PM and tried to move to the Bing party, but we weren’t able to get in. They had reached the limit of 200 people, so we would have had to wait for a large group of people to leave. most of us elected to return to our htoels and get to bed so we can all wake up in time for the 8 AM session. Ugh… too early.

Twikini actually feels like it was designed by someone who uses Twitter on a Windows Mobile phone. Selecting a post takes you to a well-laid out display and even contains actual clickable URLs. Nor more having to hit the number 1 on the keypad like the old software. You can follow and unfollow people. You can pull up timelines from anyone you want. You can even integrate with the GPS built into the phone (although the beta version I’m using now does require that I start Google Maps first to turn on the GPS). Here’s a quick look at a tweet:

If you’re using Twitter on a Windows Mobile device, give Twikini a try. You can download it from the Trinket Software web site

In the interest of disclosure, the makers of Twikini are offering free licenses to people who blog about the software, positive or negative. I’d gladly pay for it, but if someone wants to give it to me for free, I’m not going to turn it down.

• Angry Fun Ball – Microsoft IIS
• Can Cozy – Bomgar
• Earbuds – PreEmptive Solutions
• Failove Clustering with Windows Server 2008 for Dummies book – Microsoft
• Flash Drive, 1 GB – Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
• Flashing Guitar pin – INETA
• Foam Sumo Wrestler – Hitachi
• Luggage Tag – Microsoft Business Intelligence
• Stress Ball – Clarit Connect
• T-shirt – Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

• USB Mini vacuum – Symantec

  

  A few items were added for Day 4 at the Jam on IT event.

• Egg-shaped Maracas – Microsoft Regional Director Program
• Leis

• Plastic Mug – Microsoft Windows 7

  

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