Category: Events

WPC 09 Keynote July 13th

This event was streamed online.  It opened up with lots of internationals talking about collaboration, hinting talk about SharePoint 2010.  Then we got lots of “Stand by Me” performances blended together.  It left me wondering if I’d gotten on to the Microsoft Idol feed instead of WPC09.

There is a new Microsoft Partner Network to replace the old one.  This has been desired and expected for some time.  Three core pillars:

  • Capabilities: Certification I’d guess and size as usual. 30 competencies including a new advanced level. 
  • Customers: Recognise marketing and sales expertise. Customer satisfaction survey required for renewing gold partners.  More Microsoft Financing providers. 
  • Connection: Web 2.0 fluff

The program will migrate from new to old over the next 18 months.

New assets in the program:

  • A new social media site for partners.
  • Profitability modelling toolset
  • Testing for ISV’s tool
  • New Partner learning centre: badly needed because the old one looked like it was developed by a primary school dropout.  It was impossible to find materials.
  • Some sales resources tool.. updated reuse of MS IP.
  • MS publishing a roadmap for 40 new service line offerings (whatever that means).
  • New demo showcase suite for Azure
  • SEO and digital marketing assets
  • Pinpoint – looks like some kind of Virtual Earth implementation

BPOS News:

  • 250 seats for internal usage for free!
  • Order-on-behalf to improve
  • A new dashboard to track assets

There was a demo of Windows 7.  That was mostly stuff we’ve seen before at demonstrations or have done ourselves at home.

Windows 7 Volume License availability on September 1st, probably at around 20:00 GMT.

Windows User Group Event: Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory

Windows Server 2008 R2 delivers some highly anticipated features for Active Directory administrators. This session will provide a guided tour of the new AD Administrative Center and the new capabilities provided by AD PowerShell. We’ll also cover the AD Recycle Bin for recovering deleted objects, the Best Practice Analyzer for verifying your AD configuration, and improvements to service account management and authentication assurance. This session will provide you with the information you need to understand and evaluate the Active Directory features that Windows Server 2008 R2 delivers.

The agenda is as follows:

  • Provide and overview of Active Directory feature set in R2.
  • Demonstrate the use of recycle bin
  • The New admin center
  • AD PowerShell functionality

About the Speaker

The event presenter will be Wilbour Craddock, Partner Technology Advisor with Microsoft Ireland.

Will is a former Windows Server MVP and Canadian User Group lead now working for Microsoft Ireland in the Partner Team and frequent speaker on the TechNet Ireland tours. Will’s background is not that dissimilar from most IT Professionals, having started on a help desk and progressed through system administration to leadership roles in government organizations serving as a solutions architect overseeing development and deployment teams and helping set long-term IT strategies.  He blogs with the TechNet Ireland team on the IEITPro blog.

Where and When?

The event will be on September 25th.  The doors will open at 09:00.  The event will run from 09:30 until 12:30pm.

The location is Microsoft Building 1 – EPDC 2, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18, Ireland.

Register to Attend

You must register to attend this event in person.  It will be held at a Microsoft office.  As usual, the event is free of charge.

Webcast

Registration is not required to join the online webcast. You can join the web cast by:
1) Installing the free Live Meeting Client
2) Clicking on this link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=W2008R2AD&role=attend

Join The Windows User Group

You do not need to join the Windows User Group to attend this event. However, the free membership will mean that you’ll be alerted about future event.

Windows User Group Event: Operations Manager 2007 R2

Microsoft has just released the newest version of System Center Operations Manager, 2007 R2. OpsMgr, AKA SCOM, allows an enterprise to monitor the health and performance of the IT infrastructure from hardware all the way to the applications. Component monitoring, audit logging, service delivery monitoring and performance monitoring have been with us since 2007. SLA monitoring has been enhanced in 2007 R2 and Cross Platform Extensions add the ability to natively monitor UNIX and LINUX from the Microsoft platform

This session by expert Paul Keely will introduce you to OpsMgr and to the new features added in OpsMgr 2007 R2.

Agenda

09:30 Introduction
09:45 The monitoring story
10:00 Operations Manger Whistle Stop tour
10:40 Breakout
10:50 Monitoring deep dive, Monitors, Rules, Synthetic Transactions and Service level dashboards all from the field.
11:50 Q&A

The Speaker

Paul Keely has been working for Microsoft Consultant Services for the last number of years doing enterprise deployments of most of the System Center products, but mostly focusing on SCOM. Paul is back working for himself, is deeply engaged in a number of large SCOM deployments right now and is full of lessons learned and helpful information for anyone thinking about deploying SCOM, and for those working on it right now.

Where And When

Registration is mandatory for attending the in-person event at Microsoft.

The event will be held in Building 2 at the Microsoft European Development Centre (EDC), South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18. 

Registration: 09:00

Event: 09:30 until 12:00

Registration

To attend in person you must register.

Webcast

Registration is not required to join the online webcast. You can join the web cast by:
1) Installing the free Live Meeting Client
2) Clicking on this link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=OpsMgr2007R2&role=attend

Springboard Events: Windows 7 Application Compatibility: Your Questions Answered (Part 1)

Here’s the details on the latest Springboard event from MS.

Date: Thursday, June 18th
Time: 11:00am Pacific Time

Windows 7, is approaching fast and from the application standpoint is very similar to Windows Vista. We’re going to examine Windows 7 application compatibility not only from the perspective of moving from Windows Vista, but also for those coming from Windows XP. Join us to discuss the most common challenges around application compatibility when coming from a legacy operating system, why changes were made along the way, compatibility technologies inside the OS and methods for getting incompatible applications to run on Windows 7. Along the way we share tips and tricks, demonstrate free tools to analyze and fix applications and answer your specific questions about application compatibility live.

In Part 2 of this Virtual Round Table discussion (planned for later this Summer/Fall), we’ll discuss the options and approaches for using virtualization tools In depth to address application incompatibilities – including presentation virtualization, desktop virtualization and application virtualization. We’ll be sending out more details and posting information to www.microsoft.com/springboard for part 2 as the dates are finalized.

Windows User Group Event: Office Communications Server Technical Overview

The Irish Windows User Group will be running a session focusing on OCS, aka Office Communications Server.  The speaker is John McCabe, a senior engineer with CDSoft. 

Mobile users and mobile computing have enabled a more flexible workforce but there is a challenge in enabling communications that are just as flexible and mobile.  OCS can be used to resolve these issues.  For most of us, this is an alien world and we just wouldn’t know where to start.  This session aims to show you how you can use OCS to resolve communications issues in your business.

The Agenda

  • Discussion about unified communications (UC) and a quick open forum: This is to facilitate if people know what UC is to give them background information and concepts regarding it and then a quick open forum of topics/questions they would like emphasised in the run through
  • Deployment Scenarios – Internal Deployments: A Discussion on the types of deployment you can have internally in your organisation
  • Deployment Scenarios – (Remote Access/Federation/Public IM): A discussion on the types of deployment you can have for external users and internal users to communicate outside the organisation
  • Break
  • Planning For Unified Communications: Detail the process about planning for a deployment in your organisation and some of the factors you have to think about

About The Speaker

John McCabe works for CDSoft Limited based in Celbridge, Kildare. He has worked for over 12 years in the IT industry in various different fields ranging from telecoms, security, deployment and design. Over the last 12 months he has focused his attention on pushing Unified Communications in the Irish market place. He has presented alongside Microsoft on “Tech Days” about Unified Communications and many times in Microsoft “Envision” Centre. John has attained the 088-924 and 074-924 Voice Specialization Exams from Microsoft further complementing his UC skill set.

Where And When

Registration is mandatory for attending the in-person event at Microsoft.

The event will be held at Microsoft’s Microsoft European Development Centre (EDC), South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18. 

  • July 9th
  • Registration: 09:00
  • Event: 09:30 until 12:00

Live Meeting

Although the best experience is to be on site for the presentation, we will be live webcasting the event using Live Meeting.  You should use the installed (not the web) client. 

There is no need to register for the live event if you only wish to tune into the webcast.

The URL for the meeting is: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=OCSOverview&role=attend

Virtual TechNet Conference

Microsoft is hosting a virtual TechNet conference on June 19th.  Details on what’s going on are pretty light.  I do know they are covering the new versions of products, e.g. Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, OCS, etc.  You can register for free.

There’s a little bit of blurb on the events site.

“We’re pleased to announce the launch of the very first TechNet Virtual Conference taking place on 19 June 2009.

You told us that time and budget pressures make attending in person events difficult – so to help both you and the environment we decided to take the TechNet Conference virtual. Now you and your colleagues can join us to get a flavour of some key Microsoft technologies from the comfort of your own desks.

The Technology sessions, selected by the readers of the UK TechNet Flash, feature key products including:

  • Windows 7 – Deployment and Management
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 – 10 things to make life easier for IT Pros
  • An overview of Office Communications Server R2 and voice capabilities
  • The trials and tribulations of SharePoint implementation

We are also really pleased to announce an exclusive Keynote featuring Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Technical Fellow specialising in the Windows platform.

And that’s not the only difference this year. In addition to Microsoft technology news and product overviews from the experts, the TechNet Virtual Conference will also feature a second auditorium focused on IT Management, including:

  • How IT will change over the next 10 years and why you should care – an exclusive session delivered at TechEd EMEA
  • Growing the Business and Managing Costs at Microsoft – An Insider’s View, presented by Asif Jinnah, IT Manager, Microsoft UK

Be sure to get the most out of your day by getting involved and asking our speakers questions via live chat. But if you can’t make it on the day, all the content will be available after June 19th for you to watch on demand.”

Microsoft Ireland SQL Event in Cork on 4th June

“The first part of this session is a detailed look at architectural changes to the Reporting Services 2008 product and how they might benefit your reports.

The second part of the session is a demo based walk through of the new Report Builder 2.0. Focusing on the flexibility of the Tablix Format and end user charting.

We will also be taking a sneak preview of some of the new map based reporting capabilities to be introduced in SQL 2008 R2 shortly.

Speaker: Bob Duffy

Bob Duffy is a 16 year veteran of database technologies having worked closely with many enterprise customers in Ireland and Europe around SQL Server, Business Intelligence and dot.net and chalked up over 250 successful projects. Bob is currently one of eighteen Microsoft Certified Database Architects Globally, is an active speaker for SQL Server and is on the working group for the new SQL 2008 “master” examination syllabus.

Date: 04 June 2009 19:00 – 21:00

Location: Imperial Hotel, South Mall, Cork

Register and learn more here”