Category: Events

The Microsoft Ireland community launch tour hits the road again on Monday.  I’ll be hooking up with the folks at lunchtime on Monday to head up to Belfast to set up for the Tuesday launch event.  I think there is an additional morning event for students which Wilbour Craddock will be presenting.  We do the usual business oriented Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 event in the afternoon.  I’m going to add a couple of more wrinkles to my piece.  Then Wilbour does his solo again with the home oriented piece in the evening.

Wednesday sees us hit the M1 again to head back south to Dublin where we are presenting from Kevin Street DIT on Thursday.  It looks like the setup schedule will be challenging so I’m not looking forward to that.  There’s a morning event for the students and we do the usual afternoon and evening events.  Demand was huge so an additional Dublin day is being done on the Friday.  I think there’s a plan to record the Thursday event for those who couldn’t get a seat.

All the events are booked out.  I’ve seen some people say they’ll try to chance their way in.  Forget it!

I’m looking forward to next week.  I know I’ll be exhausted but these events are fun to do and it’s a chance to get out and talk to people about this stuff.  Hopefully I’ll meet some of yee out there.

Microsoft Ireland is halfway through the launch events for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.  There is HUGE interest.  For example, there are 350 seats available for the professional launch event in Dublin on the 15th.  Over 2,000 people applied for seats which were given out in a lottery – existing members of user groups were given a code to give them priority in the lottery.

Enda Flynn (who is in the DPE team, is the TechNet Ireland manager and is one of the organisers) is looking at doing another event on the 16th.  I’m one of the speakers and it’s in my calendar now.  If you’re one of the people who applied for a seat then keep an eye on your inbox.  I can’t say officially that the repeat event on the 16th is going to take place.  If it is, then notifications of a reserved seat will be sent out pretty quickly.

If you do get a seat, please do take advantage of it.  Not only are you getting €200+ worth of Windows 7 Ultimate for free but you get to see first hand some of the great new features of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, the “better together” concept and Exchange 2010.

As I mentioned just over a week ago, I’m taking part in the Microsoft Ireland community launch events for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010.  I’ve been doing the deployment, Application Compatibility and XP Mode stuff. 

Galway was fun.  The audience was really into it and asking lots of questions.  But the “fun” was the previous 24 hours.  The servers that were used in the server side of the demo were delivered late to MS so Wilbour Craddock pretty much stayed up all night to get the demo’s built.  I was up till midnight getting the XP Mode and App Compat stuff ready.  We were working in Will’s room: servers, PC’s, laptops, home servers, XBox, and cables all over the place.  I took a photo (below) which Dave Northey showed to the audience the following afternoon to show how much work had gone into this.  The following morning we were late to get our Internet setup and access to the room.  Both me an Will were still prepping when the keynote had started!  Luckily it all went well with around 180 people in attendance. 

Also of interest was the presentation by the EDC guys who revealed that Windows 7 was a global development effort in Redmond, Dublin, Haifa, India and Tokyo.  Patrick Herlihy took the responsibility for doing the Exchange 2010 launch presentation by himself and showed loads of stuff.

In the evening Will did his IT Pro and Home stuff featuring Windows 7, Windows Home Server and XBox 360.  The audience really were into it, as usual.  It’s a good session and has me considering rebuilding an old PC as a home server for backups.

On Tuesday we hit the road and set up in the hotel in Cork.  The Rochestown Hotel is a lovely place but it’s a maze.  Getting from A to B where there’s only 25 metres between them (and steps) makes moving hundreds of kilos of equipment very interesting – especially when the place seems to be 5 or 6 different buildings just stitched together.  We had a hard case which contained the PC demo stuff and on it we moved the server demo stuff.  Trying to get from our temporary prep room to Will’s room was not fun.  Eventually I went scouting and found a non-obvious short cut.  We were in good condition for the demo.  I even got to do some work before we met up with Anthony Crotty for dinner at a really nice Indian and demolished some wine.

I’d say around 160 people turned up on Wednesday.  It was a quieter audience than in Galway.  We altered the flow a little show I added BitLocker to Go to the demo.  I also added a wallpaper to the PC’s I was doing a user state capture/restore on.  One or two people noticed it didn’t restore 🙂  I figured that little snafu out pretty quickly.  Will’s at home session was pretty interactive again.  The downside for me in Cork was the number of people who were leaving once they got their free of Windows 7.  I believe there will be changes to prevent that happening again.

Belfast is up next.  TechDays back in the Spring was good up there.  We’re heading up on the 12th and doing the session on the 13th.  At this point we have it running very smoothly.  I was even able to prep Belfast while we ended the demo in Cork.  Then we head down to Dublin on the 14th to set up for the 15th.  As of last week there were some 2000+ requests for the 350 seats at the main launch event.  MS has prioritised members of the user groups which is great.  They are hoping to record the Dublin session for those who couldn’t attend.  I believe the invites went out over the weekend to the lucky few who are getting to attend.

It’s a lot of hard work but it is fun standing up there and doing the demos, especially when we are doing complex things and they’re working.  I was in bits after travelling nearly 800KM’s and working early and late last week.  But it was worth it.  I’m already looking forward to see what surprises Belfast and Dublin spring on us.

I found out last week that my fellow UK & Ireland MVP’s selected my session on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and VMM 2008 R2 for the local MVP mini-summit in Reading.  That’s cool; two years in a row.  Hopefully my laptop won’t die in the hotel over there like my last one did last year, the day before the presentation.  I’m taking the ferry over this time so I can bring some camera gear to get a little shooting done during the following weekend.  It beats being screwed over by RyanAir.

And in November I’ll be staffing the Springboard stand at TechEd EMEA in Berlin.  I’m really happy to participate in this, as a member of the Springboard STEP program.  I’ll be there in the afternoon slots and able to attend morning sessions.  I’m itching to see where things are going next year.  Odds are there will be lots of Exchange 2010 and Office 2010 content.  Exchange 2010 is set to RTM in November so it wouldn’t surprise me to see that happen at a keynote in Berlin.  It looks like the attendance from Ireland is down a good bit from last year which is a pity.

EDIT #1:

Will has also posted a blog entry on last week.

I’m lucky that I’ve just gotten a new fuel efficient car.  I’m joining the MS Ireland crew on the road to do the official public/community launch events for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  We head to Galway on Sunday to do the event on Monday afternoon.  We then roll down to Cork on Tuesday to set up the Wednesday event.  I’m back home again on Thursday morning to work.  We then head to Belfast on the 13th of October before returning for the final event in Dublin on the 15th.

These aren’t going to be the typical launch event wrapped up in endless PowerPoint decks and videos of gigantic American corporations that have no relevance to us.  This is a demo intensive session where we’re going to give real world demonstrations of some of the key features in action.  Dave Northey will be running the show and myself and Wilbour Craddock (both of the guys are from MS Ireland) are doing demos.  There will also be some content on Exchange 2010.  Attendees (you have to actually go, registration is not enough) will be picking up a free, fully functional, not-timebombed copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.  That’s worth several hundred Euros.

In the evening there is an IT @ Home session featuring Windows 7, Windows Home Server and the XBox 360.  That’ll be a good session too based on what I know about it so far.  Will will be running that one.

Be sure not to heckle and hopefully I’ll see/talk to some of you out there!

I got an interesting email from a major software publisher the other day.  They develop, sell and support solutions that run on the Windows platform.  Their integration with Microsoft is pretty tight and it’s important for their support staff to know about Windows Server Active Directory. 

The Irish Windows User Group is running a session on Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory on September 25th at 09:30GMT.  The presenter is Microsoft Ireland’s Wilbour Craddock.  We’ll be running it as an in-person event but there will also be a live webcast. 

The leader of this company’s EMEA support team asked if it would be OK to set our LiveMeeting webcast on a projector and speakers.  He had a team of 30+ staff that he wanted to attend the session so they could start learning about the new functionality.  He also said he was thinking of getting other support teams in other regions to do the same thing.  What an absolutely brilliant idea!  He asked if this was OK?  Absolutely.  If one person on his site managed the keyboard to ask questions our moderator would read them out to the presenter so they could be answered.  Now this company’s support staff could virtually attend the session without a massive road trip and abandoning the office.

So if you want to do something similar:

• Set up a PC with LiveMeeting installed on it in a meeting room and tune into the web cast.
• Set up a projector and decent external speakers for the PC.
• Assign one person to locally moderate questions and type them into the LiveMeeting client.

It’s a simple and cheap way to start the education process for your staff.

Microsoft Ireland has announced the launch events for Windows 7 and W2008 R2.  Like with the TechDays tour earlier this year, there will be events in Galway, Cork, Belfast and Dublin.  The day is split into two events: a technical session aimed at the business during the afternoon and an event in the evening aimed at using Windows 7 at home.  You have to register for each event if you want to go to both.

Each attendee will receive a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.  It’s a legit copy you’ll be able to use.  Seats are limited and demand will be great.  That’s why Microsoft has set up a lottery for the tickets instead of the usual first-come, first-served approach.  Anyone who is already a member of the Windows user Group in Ireland will have gotten a special registration code in their mail in the last few minutes.  That will give them a better chance to get a seat because community members have a reserved allocation of seats.

I’ve been a part of the planning of the events.  I can promise that the focus is demo, demo, demo.  No one will die from allergic shock to PowerPoint.  There is a huge effort to squeeze as much as possible into the events as possible.  The Windows User Group will be trying to follow up these events in the coming months to add more detail and to cover functionality that couldn’t get squeezed into the time available at the launch events.

Here is the communication from Microsoft:

“Join us at the Windows 7 Technical Community Launch and be part of Windows history! Windows 7 is launching all over the world in the coming weeks and Microsoft Ireland are offering IT Professionals and Developers in your area, a chance to see the operating system uncovered.

Click the links below to go the event page, where you can *register your interest.

Windows 7 Technical Community – General Launch Session
Galway 28th September
Cork 30th September
Belfast 13th October
Dublin 15th October

Microsoft @ Home with Windows 7
Galway 28th September
Cork 30th September
Belfast 13th October
Dublin 15th October

*Places allocated on lottery basis one week before each event.”

I have to add that Wilbour, Dave, Enda and Ronnie and a huge crowd of others are busting their butts to make this an amazing event.  They deserve a lot of credit.

With Windows Server 2008 R2 comes a new version of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s enterprise hypervisor virtualisation solution.  It brings new performance gains, better power management, Cluster Shared Volumes to allow many hosts to run many virtual machines on a single drive and, of course, the much anticipated Live Migration.

With a new version of Hyper-V comes a new version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), 2008 R2.  Still in release candidate stage, VMM 2008 R2 takes advantage of the new features in Hyper-V and brings some added improvements.

This quick session will run through the new scalability improvements and features of Hyper-V and VMM 2008 R2.

There’s no charge. All you’ll need to do is install the free Live Meeting client and join us when we start the session. The session URL is: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=W2008R2Hyper-v&role=attend 

When and Where?

This is an online only event.  It will be on September 9th at 20:00 (8PM) GMT.  That’s 21:00 CET and 15:00 EST.

We expect the session to run for around 45-60 minutes.

About the Speaker

Aidan Finn has been working in IT since 1996.  He has worked as a consultant and administrator for the likes of Amdahl DMR, Fujitsu, Barclays and Hypo Real Estate Bank International where he dealt with large and complex IT infrastructures.  More recently Aidan has been working in the server hosting and outsourcing industry in Ireland where he has focused on server management and virtualisation.  Currently he is working for C Infinity (http://www.cinfinity.ie/), an outsourcing services company in Ireland, where he is the Systems and Infrastructure Manager.  Here he has been working with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center as part of an advanced server deployment and management infrastructure.  Aidan is the leader of the Windows User Group in Ireland.  Aidan was award an MVP status in 2008 with the Configuration Manager expertise. In 2009 he was re-awarded the MVP status with an expertise in Virtualisation: Systems Management. Aidan is an active blogger (http://joeelway.spaces.live.com/).  When Aidan isn’t at work he’s out and about with camera in hand trying to be a photographer (http://www.aidanfinnphoto.com/).

Friday 31st of July is the day we systems administrators get showered with gifts from our co-workers and managers.  It’s a day of recognition for the hard work we’ve done, the nights of studying to stay up to speed, the calls at 2am on a Sunday morning.  It’s Sys Admin Appreciation Day!

Oh, I just woke up.  Sorry about that.  Same crap, different day 😉

Jeremy is a GPO and Active Directory guru, trainer and author.  He’s doing a live webcast on July 21st at 2.30 PM EST.

“You work hard. Too hard. Is there a way to leverage your existing investment in Active Directory and Group Policy to do the hard jobs so you don’t have to? In this free, concise webinar, Group Policy MVP Jeremy Moskowitz, founder of GPanswers.com, will show you that it doesn’t have to be hard to do the "tough stuff."

In this webinar, we’ll focus on something you do every day: software deployment and management (and how it doesn’t always have to be a chore). Learn what’s new in Windows 7 to help put even tighter controls on your applications and see how you can put processes around the deployment and management of applications like never before. At the end of the webinar, Jeremy will open up the webinar for questions and answers.

This webinar is sponsored by Specops Software.

It’s gonna be fun; so, hope to see you there”.

You need to register for this online event.

It sounds like all the Windows RTM rumours are quashed.  MS people are tweeting that this session will focus on MS online services such as Azure.  I suspect some of the newer systems management online services will be talked about.

Bob Muglia came on stage after everyone in the audience was named as partner of the year 😉  He told us all about his holidays … I napped for a while.  Ah, here we go.  He’s talking about the opportunities coming from his branch … server tools and System Center.  He’s going to talk about these and Azure/cloud.

We got a video on Hyper-V 2008 R2.  Pretty truthful talking about skills and costs.  Muglia demo’d VMM 2008 R2.  It’s an evolution rather than a radical reinvention so there’s no great leap in skills.  Distributed applications on OpsMgr 2007 R2 was shown.  He talked about the price difference between VMware and Hyper-V System Centre.  Do the maths; it’s real.  He did a Live Migration using streaming media.  I hate that .. it’s lazy.  Media Player buffers.  Dave Northey in MS Ireland does a ping to the VM or a file copy from an XP VM.  Very real test and always works.

On to the cloud.  He quickly talks about the cost reduction in administration.  He talks about what MS does …. hmm, we do that at work.  Except we don’t have to comply with the Patriot Act … doesn’t matter where MS builds a data centre, they need to comply with the USA Patriot Act and therefore contravene the EU Data Protection Act.  Advantages on hosting:

• Someone else does it
• Capacity on demand
• Potential global reach
• Expenses now an operating expense rather than a capital expense

Other news:

• MS evolving Server and System Center based on hosting partners experience and feedback.  To me, only OpsMgr is 100% ready.  VMM is nearly there .. self service relies on the network being too open at the moment, e.g. remote console relies access to the host server and DNS lookup for the hosting infrastructure.  DPM is totally unsuitable for the cloud as it stands.
• Dynamic Datacenter Alliance for hosters and system integrators was announced.  There’s a Dynamic Data Center toolkit.  The DDC sounds like an evolution of an old toolkit.  It’s a layer above everything else.  It’s based on PowerShell.  To join the alliance you must be a SPLA partner, attained the Hosting competency and deployed a “Dynamic Datacenter”.
• SPLA Essentials is a new SPLA licensing scheme for hosting companies.  Hopefully it will be a lot simpler.  SPLA is a nightmare.  Essentials is intended for smaller partners. 
• €150 billion opportunity through 2013 in the hosting/cloud business.  95% of that will be through MS partners.
• Azure is launched as of now.  Free to use now.  It goes commercial in November.  The pricing scheme is consumption based, i.e. unpredictable.
• New version of SCE with VMM built in on the way later this year.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 to RTM in a matter of weeks.

And on comes Steve Ballmer …

Singing Bing.  He’s goes on to talk … about stuff.  He then brought in a guy from Fortune magazine to ask Steve some of the attendee questions:

• Is Microsoft building a rival to Google Chrome and how will it affect MS products and partners? Steve says he’ll be respectful while giggling.  Why announce it if it doesn’t exist?  MS is not going to have 2 client operating systems.  50% of the time even when online we are working offline.
• Is it all about the browser or is it all about the OS.  What to develop on?  Stick to Windows, IE and Silverlight.  That will give you best of both worlds.
• Apples advertising mocks any problems MS has.  Did I’m a PC.  What is MS doing and will they use partners as a differentiator?  Continue to tell the story of the PC, e.g. recent I’m a PC that talks about the cost of the Mac.  He likes the partner inclusion suggestion.
• Losing deals to LAMP, when will MS make it easy under one agreement with a reasonable price to compete?  He took a note because he doesn’t have an answer and asks the asker to email him – steveb@microsoft.com 🙂
• What are the characteristics of MS partners that will survive and thrive in this economy?  Deliver compelling value to customers.  Remind them after the delivery.
• Show how you can save them money and sell on the theme of growth?  Do more with less.  Customers trying to do “with less, do more”, e.g. virtualization and cost cutting.
• What are the best solutions to stop piracy? The more you do to irradiate it, the more inconvenient your product becomes for the legitimate user.
• Government relations and antitrust – what is MS doing, e.g. what’s behind the EU IE unbundling from Windows 7?  Anti-trust and government relations are not necessarily related issues.  Lots of successful relationships with governments.  But antitrust laws – he says are quite separate. 
• Will there be an IT boom after the recession and will Windows 7 spark it? He thinks that if things even stayed as they are for 10 years, there would be some sort of demand growth for IT – unless there was another economic crash.  Windows 7 might be the catalyst but could be the things like BI. 
• How does MS see B2B social networking contributing to channel revenue?  It’s a big idea.  Talks about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for colleague social networking in companies. 
• MS Online Services will compete with MS Partners.  How do partners prepare?  Still work there for people.  MS the only company selling directly, through partners and via cloud.  Value add via partners still required.

Final thoughts: he’s excited to Ritalin levels.