Monthly Archive for June, 2006

What Does It Take to Feed TechEd?

Published
by
Bret Fisher
on Jun 16, 2006
in Microsoft and TechEd
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From the TechEd 2006 CommNet

* More than 1,250,000 pieces of Mikes and Ikes were consumed over the course of the week.
* 18,750 pounds of salad were prepared and offered at meals.
* 83,700 ice cream novelty bars and fruit and yogurt bars were served.
* 60,000 (or 5,000 dozen) eggs were eaten by attendees at breakfast.
* It took four tractor trailer trucks to transport the 150,000 bottles of water that were consumed this week.
* The total amount of fruit ordered for this week would fill three-quarters of a full-size tractor trailer.
* At least 1.6 million ounces of coffee were poured.
* More than 50,000 pounds of carbohydrates were consumed at Tech·Ed (Atkins who?).
* 7,500 table cloths were used and reset on a daily basis.

TechEd 2006 Photos and Videos

Published
by
Bret Fisher
on Jun 15, 2006
in Microsoft and TechEd
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I’ve posted a few videos of TechEd 2006 layout and social events (not the sessions), as well as tons of pictures of happenings in and around TechEd 2006 in Boston.

TechEd Sunday Keynote Notes

Published
by
Bret Fisher
on Jun 14, 2006
in Microsoft and TechEd
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Mostly marketing speak, but this is what I gleaned out of it.

  • MOM 2007 can fix issues with things like Virtual Server from the console (demo added ram to VM in MOM console)
  • Next version of Virtual Server can hot-add RAM and use more then one processor
  • ‘Forefront’ security line of products including client/server AV, Antigen
  • Patch for SMS 2003 out this week to allow Vista image format access and deployment of Vista from SMS GUI

TechEd Tuesday Session Notes

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by
Bret Fisher
on Jun 14, 2006
in Microsoft and TechEd
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  • Vista Deployment: several totally new tools to assist everyone with customizing a Vista image. Vista install is actually a .wim image file, which can be copied to RIS or other deployment system and use it for a default install without any changes needed. All existing tools will be updated/replaced with Vista compatibility.
  • PowerShell: extremely powerful command line scripting tool that often can use one line to do what WIM did in 50 or more lines. It’s supported to be the foundation of future admin consoles like Exchange 2007, but v1.0 which is almost RTM will not have remote system support… making this tool rather limited. It also can’t access AD without dinging into .net classes. My favorite features are ‘-whatif’ or ‘-confirm’ switches, and the export-csv cmdlet.

TechEd Monday Session Notes

Published
by
Bret Fisher
on Jun 14, 2006
in Microsoft and TechEd
. 0 Comments
  • InfoPath 2007 seems to answer all the big requests that I’ve heard of. Web forms auto-generated to match the fat client. Mobile forms auto-generated as well. Without SharePoint you lose a lot of it’s feature set for collecting data without code, but Outlook 2007 can replace grid-like data views of SharePoint in a new Outlook folder type.
  • Windows SharePoint Services v3 is updated with current trends like RSS, Wiki, and Blog support. It used to be said that you should wait till v3 of a Microsoft product to deploy, and this one looks worth waiting for (rather then deploying WSSv2 now). Full Internet ‘mode’ support is notable as well.
  • Windows Vista Wireless looks to make everything scriptable va netsh, extend GPO to support all the current security features, revamp driver models, GPO based white/black lists of SSID’s, and little tweaks here and there.
  • Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds a totally revamped searching service and feature set. Lots of refinements in the interface and manageability. Focus was placed on keeping the nav interface consistent in order to truly replace the document file share.