TechED MVP Fun

SBS Booth at TechEd

The running joke at TechEd whenever SBS comes up is… “SPS? Oh, SBS! Sorry, I’m not familiar with that product, can you please point me to that products booth?” The SBS community owes big thanks to Missy Koslosky for facilitating this as I held our first mashup “SBS booth” at TechEd. I was volunteering in the Messaging area for the usual Exchange security Q&A and Missy dragged over someone with an SBS question, and I quote:

“Have Exchange on SBS in an edge role.. and I think its an open relay”

So went back to the couch, fired up a few terminal server connections, opened up the stock SBS virtual machine and simply went at it. Few minutes later there was a crowd and it continued for the better part of an hour with people walking up, checking out the proper Exchange setup on SBS, gotchas, differences from the big server land.

Then went back to answer a question for a person from a major weapons research company on where to move the OWA frontend on a 5 site ATM connected backbone. Infinite money, infinite bandwidth, moving stuff around out of boredom. “Have you heard of ExchangeDefender ma’am?”

SBS Birds, Feathers, Debugging

Went to Susan Bradley’s session yesterday and taped an hour and a half of video. You’ll get to see it when I get back to Orlando, it was amazing to see her break down the best practices on everything from R2 to Quickbooks and everything she usually talks about in that little time. Nobody was killed but it came close, very close.

Now the following picture begs for a good caption. Here is my try:

“Debugging process completed, the 2×4 has been removed”

I’d love to hear your captions, comments are open.

Another Party?

Yes! I’m absolutely exausted from the presentations, q&a, busses and one or two parties every night followed by business stuff into the wee hours of the night. It’s absolutely insane but I have had a chance to meet to many people at such a high level that an hour of sleep I get each night is totally worth it. I think I need to get into the hard liquor game, maybe that helps as I’ve seen the same people consistently drunk every night and in top shape again in the morning so I’m doing something wrong here drinking the sodas.

Either way, went to the MVP appreciation party last night and got to chat to a TON of my fellow MVP’s along with an entrepreneur that had the similar business experience I had (Windows Device Driver MVP!) and later the person that manages the doc team for E12 on the bus ride back to the hotel. I think the reason I’m loving all of this so much is because I’m really put in the element with the people that work on the same type of stuff I do. “Yeah, we have a SAN in two sites and we’re trying to solve this problem.. or I have 6 frontend servers and I  want to get routing info from LDAP instead of managing the event sink configuration by hand… ” as opposed to “I have an unreliable cable modem so I’m trying to hotwire a dialup connection with a static IP address and do load balancing for my domain but I’m not a fan of TZO… why won’t ExchangeDefender work with a dynamic IP address?… Vlad, you suck, why can’t you redirect my mail to port 26?”

Two more days to go. Today is the Vlad lab day, I think I’m blowing off the trip to Fenway since we’re getting the tail end of Alberto up here today. I can’t get away from f’n hurricanes.