Well I am into the third session at Tech.Ed, and so far it’s been pretty decent. I must say that apart from a few ‘geeky moments’ from the presenters *PowerShell* shreeks in the Keynote, and a very lame crowd photo graph, its been informative. I am really keen to play with the Windows 7 touch interface. Retail and distribution uses are endless and I think there could be some fantastic solutions to be developed around this.
The second session of the day demonstrated the new features of Windows Server 2008 R2. DirectAccess and BranchCache are are game changers for why you would want to continue to rollout Microsoft desktop and server technologies. The level of innovation from Microsoft always amazes me. There will be some people that say that Windows 7 is no different to Vista or XP, but if dig into the management and enterprise features, I think that Microsoft have done a great job moving forward. One of the coolest things is the ability to push a VHD file on a disk, and be able to boot the OS from this file using the baremetal. I need to explore this, and get some more information to explain it.
I am now sitting in the Exchange Architecture session, and I must say I am a little underwhelmed by Exchange 2010. Sure, they have done a good job improving High Availability features, but I can’t see a reason to rush and get customers I work with to adopt the RC (which is upgradable to the RTM on release) today. It’s simplified in one respect, particularly around the Hub Transport and CAS roles, but from a storage point of view, I think they have actually made it more difficult to plan from a storage capacity point of view, and also forgive me if I am wrong here, but I can’t see why a customer would want to support MORE Windows Server instances. It seems to me that the Exchange platform footprint is expanding at the same speed as my waistline.
More to come through the week…
