Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Last day at TechEd. It feels like an hour before DisneyLand closes and you still want to go on four rides. The lines are shorter, you see the fireworks and are just running around to see everything you didn’t get. Unfortunately, there is a lot to be seen and a lot to be done – like a few dozen labs on all the technologies we can use. Booth babes are gone, here is that big vendor hall….

But the good news is that its easy to find the people you know. Below is a pic of Tom Shinder, fellow MVP and an author of all those ISA books. Tom is the guy that helped us with some ISA issues a while back so it was a pleasure to meet him.

Jim Harrison, the author of… well, many great oneliners on the sbs2k list is here is well. And as usual, he delivered a good one to a few hundred people:

“I don’t care what you’re using for routing.. Cisco, Linksys… monkeys in buckets”

There you go! More amazing people, so little time. SBS Show tonight…

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.

Long, long day here at TechEd. As I’ve said quite a few times this is not an SMB (neither S nor M) event by any means but we’ve still managed to represent. From left to right, Anne Stanton, me, Susan Bradley, Terry Constable, Jeff Middleton. Today, quite frankly, the most valuable day for me since becoming an MVP. I feel like I traveled into the future. Huge thanks to the PMs, Senior PMs, group PMs and all the other big cheese of Microsoft Exchange.

Will blog about this tomorrow, its quite unreal how many of you I’ve been able to reach over the past year of doing this. Not a day has gone by that I meet yet another stranger that seems to know who I am – glad I was of some help to you. I’ll be at the MSG center all day tomorrow (Wednesday) so if you’ve got an Exchange question stop by. We’re also doing birds of the feather session on SBS tomorrow, Jeff is doing his speach tomorrow so there will be a lot there for those of you that want to hear about this TechEd Lochness Server that we’re such big fans of.

Will break it down for you tomorrow.

WARNING: Post not approved, sponsored or otherwise consented to by Microsoft; solely my observations.

Here I am at Microsoft TechEd 2006, the premier event for us in the business of running Microsoft-powered networks. Here is a glimpse for those of you that couldn’t make it due to time, budget, PHB concerns. This year TechEd is in Boston and geeks from all over the world (developers, app guys, infrastructure) are getting together to see what Microsoft has up their sleve. Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Chris Capossela are delivering the keynote later tonight.

Registration hall, lines upon lines of people waiting to be checked in.

Main exposition hall welcomes you with a big rug of Microsoft Virtualization solutions. I’m guessing about 200 sq ft, easilly bigger than my office.

Exposition Hall has some really cool stuff. Here are somet things available. Many product groups are represented and have demo workstations for ambasadors, MVPs and other volunteers to demonstrate new technologies. Exchange 2007, Visio 2007 and Grove 2007 below.

Nearly every core server technology is here, from Active Directory on up to PowerShell  Nice thing about these booths is that you can meet people that are close to the product. I stopped by the DPM booth to pick up a brochure (haven’t seen it since Beta) and got to meet Jason Buffington, Sr. Technical Product Manager for the product. Former MVP too

Each big Microsoft division has a hands on lab presence. Table covers depict the product you can try out, Vista below. Each one has a lab manual chained to the table with several to pick from! 

Select a lab and the system automatically rolls out the lab for you. After you’re done you get taken to the evaluation.

This is where I will likely be all week, Messaging and Mobility (and Office) – Hands On labs have everything here, nearly every app is present even CRM.

If you’re here, come say hello. I’ll be fielding questions at the Messaging and Mobility desk. It’s a little bit too early, no phones around at all!

Intel is the platinum sponsor. I’ll get a better view for you tomorrow, the sponsor arena is huge but honestly seems to be a third of the entire hall, most of it is dedicated to learning, labs, booths, whiteboards and discussion / lounge.

Mike Iem, who should be a familiar face to a number of you. Mike introduced me to the lady that “owns” (Microsoft speak for runs) the TechEd event. Over 7,000 expected for the keynote later tonight, over 12,000 expected in for tomorrow.

Keep an eye on Bink and Neowin.net as they tend to have reporters at all of these. As for our little Exchange and SBS world, we’re here in full force. Susan Bradley is here, Terry Constable is here, Jeff Middleton will be here any day. We will try to fire off a podcast for you and give you a sense of what its like to be here. Stay tuned.

Sounds like TicketMaster SPAM, doesn’t it? “Ticketmaster – Don’t miss Whitesnake!”

I’ll be on the road a LOT over the next month, so if you’re coming to the same events or if you live in Boston or Dallas, stop by and say hello. Lunch, as always, is on me so let me know. Here is my tenative schedule:

June 11–17, Boston, Microsoft TechEd

July 16–19, Dallas, Working on the new DC

July 9–14, Boston, Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

So if you happen to be in the neighborhood please drop me an email and lets work out the scheduling. I’m pretty much available for anything other than TechEd nights since I intend to hit all the geek parties that happen there. For WWPC, count me in though, as I’m not the fan of Amy Luby’s geezer bands. Wonder who they dig up for entertainment this year, wonder if Foreigner or Blondie or Quiet Riot. God knows they put B-52’s back under by now.

Update: Florida groups; If there is anything you want from either of the two Microsoft events let me know.

Update 2: Dallas is in July, sorry.