TechEd 2011 – Areas of Interest #msteched

I find it difficult sometimes to narrow the list of sessions I want to attend at TechEd each year. I’m an IT generalist, responsible for a long list of technologies. About the only thing I don’t do is application development. I’m not a developer (aside from hacking together scripts for admin purposes) and never want to be one. if you a a dev, no offense, it just doesn’t float my boat.

If you drop any dev-related sessions, that still leaves a long list of products… Windows Client, Windows Server, Exchange, Lync, System Center (itself a long list of products), Forefront (a list of products that keeps getting longer), plus a little Windows Phone. I work with all of these, so which to pick?

This year System Center and Lync will probably occupy my attention the most.I’m especially looking forward to learning more about the 2012 versions of products like Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM) and others. We’ve also just recently deployed Forefront Endpoint Protection and are looking at Threat Management Gateway (TMG) and Unified Access Gateway (UAG). TMG is a given as we have ISA 2006 in production and I really want to get that upgraded.

A Lync upgrade to our OCS environment (very small, no voice) is in our future as well, so will be good to chat with folks using it now who went through the upgrade.Voice is handled centrally at Washington University and that group is looking at Cisco’s VOIP solution, so we need to get a sense for how they might integrate.

A little MDOP, a little App-V, and I’ll call it a successful TechEd. How about you? What are you focusing on this year?