So wrapped up the last day of Exchange Connections today and having a weird sense of excitement and confusion.

Here is my conundrum: My technical session Q&A was all about business related question. My business session was all about technical questions. In my technical session I had one slide on business considerations that really lit up the crowd, on the business side I had a screenshot that brought up enough questions for me to take it apart in a live demo (over the wire, production server, live change style).

So what did I learn? Among the enterprise crowds many do technical consulting for Exchange, but few do it with SBS. And even though many are… curious… SBS remains an edge case that is not considered seriously.

Now before you put me in the cannon and light the match please understand that this is simply my observation. Yes, I had a good crowd in the hallways at Exchange Connections, bunch of people at the Microsoft TechEd “experts couch” but the interest is few and far in between and (gulp) warrants the type of absence SBS has on the big stage.

Done with my first presentation. As you can tell they gave me a really big room for my Mobility & Compliance session and I packed it… with one guy. The other speakers tried to make me feel better because I was going up against Steve Riley but it still felt a little defeating to present to a few dozen people. I think at some point I had about 20 people but I ended up with  a decent mix of just a few.

I even shot a picture of a few of them that remained after the presentation and to my surprise they had a lot of business question. The gentleman in the suit jacket is from Belgium and said that SBS was huge (“the only thing”) abroad. It was nice to get a global perspective, on SBS, at such an enterprise event.

And thats me with the “unauthorized E12 button” proving I was actually here

So what have I learned so far?

First off, there is a lot of interest in SBS, small business and consulting even for the enterprise engineers. Strong interest. However, their primary concern is being good at what they do and working on their skills.

And oh my god did that feel good.

One thing that consistently disappoints me about my peers in the SMB space is the total disregard and disrespect for ones technical abilities. When Jeff Middleton spoke to our Orlando ITPRO group last month I wrote down only one line where Jeff reflected on where his fees go: “….some of it goes into the skills that I maintain.”

One thing that I’ve brought to Las Vegas and one thing I continue to do is to constantly bridge the values of SMB and the skills of engineers. It can be hard at times because each space can lack grownups that enter conversations…. but SMB technicians have the work ethic and values where they are constantly representing their clients best interest and looking out for them…. and in the high-end technical field respect is earned through ones expertise, performance and pride in the craft, abilities and development of those skills.

I feel that given enough time, passion and perseverance everyone at this conference can benefit from the union of those values. But we have to learn to share and learn to respect one another. We’re all ITPRO’s after all, right?

Exchange Connections begins today and I have to admit that nobody brings up high-rises faster than Las Vegas these days. I’m presenting three sessions at the Microsoft Exchange Connections 2006 event which is a part of the WinConnections.com (Dev/ASP/Office/SQL etc) family. I’m covering one on auditing, one on automating and one on managing Microsoft Exchange in an SMB environment. All sessions are very community focused and driven on best practices and experiences of running thousands of Exchange servers at OWN. But enough about me, more about the event:

The theme is “ready for a new day” and the show is packed with “Who’s Who” among Windows Server family experts, Microsoft employees and sharp folks in general. Even during the checkin yesterday someone showed me a demo of Windows CE 6.0 prototype running on the HTC Wizard. In short, my kind of crowd  

2007 wave presence is huge here. I spoke to a few folks last night and we talked about how this was different from TechEd – in their words “they had better food at TechEd”; Then again, we are in Vegas, if you can’t find good food here you need help.

One surprise? Vendors are starting to look down…. it’s amazing. I was walking through the vendor hall last night and I nearly busted out laughing at the “EMC for SMB” banner. I am not slanting EMC a bit here, they have spectacular products and we have given many-a-firstborn to EMC over the years…. but their reputation does not go hand in hand with SMB at all.

So, thats about it… And a few pictures:

View from my room… thats the airport.

As usual, I’ve brought all my flare..

Ready for a new day? Yup, it’s all about 2007.

Happening at Mandalay Bay.

Vendor Hall.. lots of SMBish talk and solutions..

I have never been more excited to go to Las Vegas.

I’ll be staying at Mandalay Bay and presenting three sessions on Microsoft Exchange and the 2006 Exchange Connections.Whats even more exciting is that while the event and the sessions are sure to focus on the future, my presentations are on the common-sense administration of SBS and Exchange as a sole administrator, tips and tricks for managing Exchange quickly and efficiently. I’m trying out some new stuff as a technical presenter so wish me luck.

… and if you’re in Las Vegas – I’ll be there till Sunday – track me down!

Yes, I’m going to Las Vegas in the morning but thats not what this post is about.

You see today we announced our mega-plan to launch Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. Having gone through three product release cycles of customers pondering “We’ll wait till they fix it in SP1” because they heard some imbecil on the radio say it wasn’t ready, we decided to do something about it.*

So starting the end of the month we’ll be shipping 1,000 systems running RC’s of Vista and Office to our managed clients offices. This way we get to show them what the next wave is all about, get to test the OS with their current LOBs, get to hook that one technology decision maker without a single signature, permission or question. Box just comes there with a return label where in 4–6 months we sweep it back and turn it into an ExchangeDefender node. Entire effort gets written off as a marketing expenditure before the holidays and we rack up Vista deployments on actual business benefits and values instead of marketing fluff.

* Why are people inclined to take advice from radio show pundits? Seriously, think about it -if they had half a brain they would be making more than $18,000 a year. Second, what does a DJ know about software development? Software testing? Software release quality? I’m sorry, I’ve listened to their radio shows, saw them on TechTV, heard them all over the place and even seen them sprawled over the Maxim centerfold – but I have yet to find someone that knows an ounce about software development and operating systems. They are as capable of judging Vista as I am qualified to judge a body building competition.

Many predicted it would come, for years.

Many agreed it would make sense for Microsoft.

Well, they have.

And for days my phone has been ringing around the clock with reporters wanting to hear my opinion because I sit on both edges of the Linux-Windows musical chairs. Is this good for Microsoft? Is this good for Linux? Is this good for Novell? I won’t bore you with 30 pages of my opinion on this but I will help you find all the answers you’ll ever need on this subject:

Try to find a single Linux fan that is happy with this move.

Go on. I’ll wait.

Back so soon? Found nothing? Get the idea yet? No?

Alright, now find a list of companies that will benefit from this deal.

Go on. I’ll wait. Microsoft… Novell… anybody else?

That second task is more telling than the first one. Microsoft, known for its long tradition of great partnerships, has done it again.

Yeah, yeah I know… Long time no SBS Show, the world is ending. Unfortunately for both me and my significantly-audiable-one, that work thing we do between the free stuff for “the community” has been getting in the way of fun stuff. We will have a very exciting two-part SBS Show out soon but we’re also working on the newsletter and a few other things that come out at the exact same time.. thus the delays. But I know you’d appreciate something in the meantime so here is a great show by our friend Eriq Neale:

Today’s episodes of eOnCall feature an interview with Sandi Hardmeier, IE MVP, about the IE7 release. If you haven’t had time to look at IE7 yet, or if you have clients who are wondering about IE7, this would be a good pair of episodes to catch. The broadcast airs today, and the archives will be available no later than tomorrow morning on the show web site, http://www.eoncall.com.