We ran our first Windows User Group event for quite some time last Friday. It was a full day, with about 45% of the 138 registrants turning up. The other 55% missed out on an excellent day that was stuffed full of information.
I kicked off with the intro. Dave Northey (MS Ireland DPE) stepped in with a quick few slides on how MS Ireland is getting even more involved with the community, including a new feedback tool based on Silverlight. I talked about Service Pack 1 beta release for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This featured a live demo of Dynamic Memory being configured, pushed to the extremes of my demo laptop, and handling things quite well. It was quite an interactive session. The question of the morning was:
“Would a virtual machine that has expanded from 2 GB RAM up to 8 GB and then ballooned back to 2GB take longer to live migrate than a VM with a static 2 GB of RAM?” I didn’t for certain so I checked with product group. The answer is: live migration only has to handle whatever memory is physically assigned so the answer is the times should be identical. Somehow, I screwed up the audio of my webcast but some people stayed tuned in anyway.
The coffee break came a little late. Martha Rotter (MS Ireland DPE) did a quick session to demo Windows Phone 7 and IE9. I think everyone was impressed with IE9 being able to use a client’s GPU to process graphics.
Nathan Winters (Exchange MVP, Gray Convergence) did a session that covered Exchange 2010 SP1. There was a little info on Exchange 2010 and tonnes of new info. Nathan reckons you could probably have an entire day on just SP1!
Lunchtime – and MS Ireland has especially set up a demo booth with the Xbox 360 Kinect device (that’s the one where you become the controller). It was difficult bringing people back into the auditorium after that!
There was a session swap because of schedule conflicts. Wilbour Craddock (Partner team, MS Ireland) did a session on SCE 2010. Most MS Ireland customers fall into the small & medium business bracket so this was of great interest to people. It’s still surprising how many people have not heard of SCE because it solves many problems that are not being resolved by the usually deployed free/crap-ware.
The sessions ended with John McCabe (Unified Communications MVP, CDsoft Ltd) presenting on UC (Live Communications) “wave 14”. We now know this as Lync Server 2010 (Hmm, interesting name). This one isn’t that widely adopted in Ireland which is odd; it solves many problems but I think the ability to telecommute is held back more by employers attitudes rather than technology at this point.
We wrapped up the day by giving away lots of goodies. Books, Arc mice, XBox games, stress balls, all went out. We ended up running out of questions to ask the audience for the prizes – the last question was “who wants to go home now?”.
Feedback was positive. We’re already planning the next session. The original plan was to have it in February. That might be brought forward but that depends on a few things. Details will be communicated asap.