These will get pretty long as I'm kind of wordy, but these are impressions as things are occurring.

Registration is a little crazy. I'm not sure who desgined this

conference, but it's split among the two sides of the conference center

in Orlando. I've attended 3 or 4 Tech Eds, a couple PDCs, and half a

dozen other conferences. In all of the cases, the entire conference is

in one building. A big one, but one building. Here the keynote is in

the west center and the show/expo, and the backpack you get loaded with

marketing material and swag, is in the South center. If you've never

seen the Orlando convention center, that's a big deal. There's a 1/2

mile walk outside in the Florida heat between them. Not a big deal to

me, since I like the heat, but I sweat, so it's not so nice for my

neighbors.

Keynote

  I arrived late, and it was packed. If you've attended others,

you know that it's usually the case you have 4 or so large screens. It

seems most conferences have moved towards dual screens, showing the

speaker on one and a computer on the other. The recent BI conference

had 2 pairs of screens. TechEd has 6 pairs. It's a big show.

  Talking about models for optimization of your IT processes. It's

a good idea and I think we need more reference models and also most

explanations on how to map our internal IT processes to the model.

  Energizer - The first video was from Envergizer, which was also

a featured company with the BI conference. They must be a heavy

Microsoft user. Their initial plan was to be 2 years behind any release

of software. Sharepoint is a featured, which shows just how much focus

is being put on thie particular piece of software.

  The focus on IT this year seems to be working on an agile,

rapidly changeably infrastructure, being able to move in real-time.

  Gartner

  - Connections more pervasive

  - reponse time expectations are shrinking.

  - technology can really enable differentiation.

  - relationships are online and short-lived (is this true? Or has

business pushed us this way? In some ways it has, in others it hasn't.)

  - Agility is hard. It seems that the gap between agile and

not-so-agile companies is growing. Agility is sensing a change and

efficiently and rapidly responding.

  - 70% of IT budgets maintaining. But successful companies have moved that to 50-50.

    - Focus on costs, cost based on usage, not more efficiency. A utiltiy model

     - Quality of service with management based on

policies. Matching up what IT can do with the business needs. Not

everything needs 5 9s or subsecond response.

     - be agile. infrastructure is more dynamic.

  - Need to build other metrics besides cost to allow you to measure this and improve it.

  - Ask business what they need and translate those needs into measures and begin to work with those measures.

  - Gartnew has an IT maturity model

    - Focus on process, technology, and culture. All three are important.

     - Don't use long-termprojects. They usually

fail. Work on smaller pieces instead with ROI measured in each stage.

Not just cost, but also quality, and agility. Usually it is cost

recovery in early stages with later stages needing investment to gain

on quality and agility.

  XEN open source software is including Microsoft interoperability

in their distrobutions. Licensing agreements are occuring, so it seems

thatt Microsoft is trying to work with open source software.

  There was a good docus on the interoperability and the efforts

their making to work with other software and embrace stadnards. I'm not

sure how much I believe it, but they do seem to be working a bit better

with ther systems. Is it Microsoft or the toher companies?

  The Back to the Future car was on stage and Christopher Lloyd

showed up on stage a few times.  Microsoft does go all out at

TechEd and they usually have some godo guests.

  Windows Server 2008 Demo

   - Server Core - Minimal installation option for

specialized installation. This means that a file server canjust have

the file server services. Good for virtualization. IIS, file server, AD

server can be roles. Only a command line interface for server admin.

    - Virtual Server lets you use multicore cpus.

    - System Center has a virtual server manager. VMWare

machines can be converted to MS virtual machines. Built on powershell.

    - Physical servers can be converted to virtual machines.

    - move VMs from one host to another. Quick Migration is the option that you can do today with Virtual Server.

    - Demo was a bit fast, but well delivered.

  - New model driven management tools

    - System Center, Operations Manager, modeling

applications for a company. Operations Manager can see errors, like web

erors. There is a "Problem Path" section that can highlight all the

components showing errors. A lot of design and documentation work to

get things set, but it certainly could assist your production team in

managing servers. Not sure about security, rights, etc., but it's a

good idea in general.

     - Katmai - Policies in Management Studio, and

we can set policies for servers. This allows us to set settings for

standards and I can now see if a database is not set according to

policy. Things like db options, etc. These can rollup to System Center.

SML is a theme. This seems like the next wave of XML use in Microsoft.

We had the XML for visual displays in Vista, and now we're seeing SML

for system modeling.

Services are important. One of the four pillars that Microsoft is

pushing is the need for software services. SOA is definitely something

to watch and learn a bit more about. BizTalk has been working with

"services in the cloud" where disparate companies can easily set up

services that they can use to talk to each other. Not sure how well

this will take off, but it's interesting.

Kind of a cool demo showing the Dundas technology Microsoft has

licensed for Reporting Services 2008. An easy to build report with a

map control in it. At the BI conference, I also saw the Excel and Word

integration technologies for building reports. The rest of the demo was

a bit drab. Not a great presented, and it seemed that they were trying

to push Biztalk, but I didn't really see it as a great technology to

use. Maybe I don't get it, but I think if I don't, then most people

won't.

It's nice to see that Microsoft hasn't forgotten the user experience.

The fourth pillar was absed on the user interface, and featured

:Expression, silverlight, and Office with Visual studio. VS2008 was

used with the office tools included. An extension to Outlook was built.

I can see people getting a little crazy with this, but it's a good

idea. Getting more, rich Outlook messages is a good step to ensuring

people stick with the platform. And it makes for a better experience as

well. But it does tie you tighter to Microsoft. I'm ok with it, but

some people may be concerned. I think this is mostly for internal mail,

so I'm not sure what would happen when it transitions outside your

domain.

Losing my battery, more later.