Tag: Windows User Group

Windows User Group Ireland, September 10th 2010

The Windows User Group is back with a day-long event featuring updates on the latest in Microsoft IT infrastructure. Join us on Friday, September 10th in the Microsoft Auditorium in Leopardstown to hear expert speakers talking about Windows Server, virtualization, Exchange, unified messaging, and System Center for the small/medium enterprise. This day will give you valuable information that will educate you on what benefits new technologies from Microsoft will bring to your business.

The agenda is

Start

Finish

Session

Speaker

08:45

09:15

Registration

09:15

10:45

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX

Aidan Finn (MVP), System Dynamics

10:45

11:00

Break

11:00

12:30

Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010

Nathan Winters (MVP), Grey Convergence

12:30

13:15

Lunch

13:15

14:45

Communications Server 14

John McCabe (MVP), CDSoft Limited

14:45

15:00

Break

15:00

16:30

System Center Essentials 2010: Enterprise Management for the SME Customer

Wilbour Craddock, Microsoft

You can register and attend the event for free.

Date: Friday, September 10th, 2010

Location: EPDC-2, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18

Registration: 08:45 to 09:15 with a strict start time of 09:15

The detailed agenda and speakers’ bios are as follows:

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX (90 Minutes – 09:15 until 10:45)

Speaker: Aidan Finn (MVP: Virtual Machine), Infrastructure Team Lead with System Dynamics

Webcast: LiveMeeting

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is around the corner. It introduces some new features that will be of huge interest to anyone that is interested in Hyper-V or Remote Desktop Services (including Citrix software). Memory is often the main constraint in virtual machine to host density. Dynamic IT provides a new mechanism for configuring virtual machines with a variable amount of memory. Aidan will discuss what over commitment is and how it is bad. He’ll then introduces you to the mechanics behind Dynamic Memory and show it in action. Aidan will also introduce you to RemoteFX. This is a new solution to provide high quality graphics, such as 1080p video, to Remote Desktop clients. This will be used in Remote Desktop Services and compatible Citrix solutions.

About Aidan Finn:

Aidan is the Infrastructure Team Lead with System Dynamics, a consulting services company located in Dublin that provides IT infrastructure and business intelligence expertise. He has been working in IT since 1996 and has specialised in working with Microsoft infrastructure solutions including Server, desktop, System Center and virtualisation. Aidan is an MCSE and a Microsoft Valuable Professional with an expertise in virtualization. Aidan co-wrote Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2 (Sybex), is the lead author of Mastering Hyper-V Deployment (Sybex), and is contributing to Mastering Windows 7 Deployment (Sybex). You can find his blog at https://aidanfinn.com.

Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010 (90 Minutes – 11:00 until 12:30)

Speaker: Nathan Winters (MVP: Exchange), Unified Communications Lead with Grey Convergence

Webcast: LiveMeeting

Exchange 2010 SP1 was announced at TechEd US 2010 and contains some exciting enhancements to Exchange 2010. This session will first set the context for these new features and then walk you through what is now possible:

· Reminder of the Exchange 2010 core tenets

· An update on where Microsoft is with Exchange Online

· Introduction to the Feature Enhancements of Exchange 2010 SP1 such as:

· The New Exchange Control Panel Management UI

· Improved High Availability and Disaster Recovery functionality

· Improved Outlook Web App UI and Performance

· Better Mobile Device Experience

· New Information Protection and Control

Ø Personal Archive Enhancements

Ø Retention Policy Management Enhancements

Ø Multi-Mailbox Search Enhancements

· Demo

· Questions & Answers

About Nathan Winters:

Nathan Winters is the unified communications lead at Grey Convergence, a specialist Microsoft partner for unified communications and collaboration. Nathan has been working in IT for eight years and specializes in unified communications with a focus on Microsoft Exchange and Office Communications Server. Nathan has consulted at numerous Fortune 100 companies across a variety of vertical markets.

In 2006, Nathan founded the Microsoft Messaging and Mobility User Group UK, which holds regular meetings in the UK to discuss topics related to Exchange. In 2007, Nathan was named an MVP (Exchange Server) for his work with MMMUG and his regular contributions to the Mark Minasi Forum, and he has received the same honour each year since.

Nathan’s articles have been published on leading websites and magazines, including Windows IT Pro Magazine, MSExchange.org, Simple-Talk.com, Microsoft (TechNet Industry Insiders), and the MMMUG website.

You can contact Nathan at nathan@clarinathan.co.uk or through his blog at http://www.nathanwinters.co.uk

Communications Server 14 (90 Minutes – 13:15 until 14:45)

Speaker: John McCabe (MVP: Unified Communications), Technical Consultant with CDSoft

Webcast: LiveMeeting

Communications Server 2010 (Wave 14) is Microsoft’s Next Generation Unified Communications Platform. It brings many new features including a completely new UI. John will bring you through the main features and some of the new supported scenarios available in this platform and discuss how you can even use it now to replace your PBX! This really will be a serious contender for businesses of all sizes.

About John McCabe:

John currently works as a Technical Consultant for CDSoft Limited providing solutions to the Irish Market Place across multiple industries. John has over 12 years in the IT Industry ranging different disciplines from security, networks and of course Microsoft Infrastructure. John has attained MCITP/MCTS/MCP in various tracks as well as a multiple other professional certifications. John was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in October 2009 for extensive community work and promoting the Microsoft Product Group.

System Center Essentials 2010: Enterprise Management for the SME Customer (90 Minutes – 15:00 until 16:30)

Speaker: Wilbour Craddock, Partner Technical Specialist, Microsoft

Webcast: LiveMeeting

The aim of this session is to provide a technical overview of the key capabilities of SCE 2010, and how it provides an integrated management solution for SMB customers, from hardware right through to the virtual OS’s running on Hyper-V and applications/services in these VM’s. Attendees will gain valuable information around differentiating SCE with the other System Center technologies, which form part of the Server Management Suites, from both a technical, and pricing perspective. We’ll also cover DPM 2010; part of the new SCE Plus SKU, and how it provides a centralized, powerful SMB-friendly application protection and DR solution, protecting both virtualized servers, application workloads, and desktop data.

To help attendees understand the solutions better, we’ll be constructing a customer scenario to provide a complete solution that can be adapted for specific customer and partner engagements. This solution will include both licensing, and pricing information, to give a better idea of the overall solution cost, and ROI. We’ll focus on delivering a demo of this scenario, concentrating particularly on the virtualization management, PRO functionality, hardware integration, and overall management of the environment.

About Wilbour Craddock:

Wilbour 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. Wilbour’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.

That Time of Year Again

I got the dreaded email this week.  Contained in it was the attachment.  Every potential MVP or MVP up for annual renewal in the UK/Ireland is sent a spreadsheet that asks for your last year of activity.  My renewal (or not) is July so the review process for me started this week.  The spreadsheet can take a couple of hours to complete if you have done a good bit of work.  Luckily I keep records of the activity so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.  After this it is wait until July 1st and then refresh the MVP profile site to see if my name is still up there.  A mail is sent later that day either congratulating you or expressing the bad news.

I heard this week that we got 3 new MVP’s in Ireland this month, one in OpsMgr, one in UC and one in CRM … there’s a lot of privacy stuff wrapped up in it so we think those were the specialties.  Well done folks!  We did lose one MVP late last year … but only because he became a MS employee.  We think our numbers here are around 13-14, still quite a rare species, and still only half of what it should be.

Discussions were held this week to also re-launch the Windows user group.  Attendances were dropping off.  We think it’s because asking people to come to a venue every month on a Friday morning was tough – people are losing jobs all over the place and there are exactly zero legitimate IT pro job openings (I hear there are plenty of fake ads for CV/resume harvesting).  We also know that evening events and very-early morning events are non-starters.

Another MVP, John McCabe (Unified Communications) has expressed interest in helping out which is more than welcome.  We’re looking now at doing bigger, multi-track, day long events about 3 times a year, with a keynote speaker, maybe from Redmond (any Redmond folks fancy a trip to Dublin?  If so, I’ll put you in contact with the right person in the Irish sub).  Most of the product expert speakers will be from the community, mainly from Ireland but some invitees from abroad.  The provisional date for the first one is in September.  I think it could be a pretty fantastic event with a nice mix of content covering different aspects of the business that IT Pro’s in Ireland work with and care about.  More details on that later.  Oh you can safely bet I’ll be talking about something in the virtualization world.

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Windows User Group Event: Windows 7 Application Compatibility

This is the latest Irish Windows User Group event that we have organised.

One of the challenges of migrating to a new desktop operating system is getting those legacy applications to work. This can seem so daunting that many organisations choose not to take advantage of new technology solutions to resolve business issues because the perceived cost and time requirements to get those applications working is too much.

Good news! Migrating to Windows 7 is a whole lot easier thanks to the solutions provided by Microsoft. These vary from technology built into the operating system, a free suite of tools provided by Microsoft and tools that are included in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

The available solutions were briefly talked about and demonstrated at the community launch events for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

In this session Vikas Sahni is going to walk you through using some of the solution available from Microsoft to get your legacy applications working on Windows 7. The agenda includes:

Session I – The Changes

  • Windows 7 Goals
  • Operating System Version – Compatibility Tab, Shims and Layers
  • UAC changes
  • IE changes
  • Depreciated Apps – Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker

Session II – The Tools

  • Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.5
  • LUA Tools and Solutions
  • Sysinternals Tools
  • IE Compatibility Test Tool

The Speaker

Vikas Sahni will be presenting this session. He is the CEO of Softedge Systems. Vikas is a software expert and has a history as a technical trainer.

Softedge Systems, the first European Microsoft IP Venture Partner, is a Dublin based software company. We focus on providing unique solutions for our clients and help distinguish them from their competition. We also develop and market software products that are differentiated by their ease of use. Softedge with its R&D and project management teams in Ireland and coding team in India is able to offer high quality, cost-effective software development for third parties.

Webcast

Please DO NOT REGISTER if you are going to join the webcast.

You can join the web cast by:

1) Installing the free Live Meeting Client
2) Clicking on this link

Where and When

Microsoft Ireland Building 1, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18, Ireland

February 5th.  Welcome at 09:30am, starting at 10:00am sharp.

Registration

Please DO NOT REGISTER if you are going to join the webcast.

You can register here.

Join The Windows User Group

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

Webcast Recording: Deploying Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2

This morning I spoke at my first Microsoft Springboard STEP event.  The subject was “Deploying Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2” and featured WAIK/WSIM, Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010.  We had a nice turn out and apart from my XP VM acting a bit funny at the end, all went well.  It was very much a demo, demo, demo session.

I recorded the webcast.  You can see the entire thing, unedited, right here.  It will be available for 365 days from now.  And here is the slide deck:

Thanks again to the folks at Microsoft Ireland for organising the venue and for helping to spread the word and thanks too to all who came along or tuned in live.

Webcast Recording: Deploying Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2

This morning I spoke at my first Microsoft Springboard STEP event.  The subject was “Deploying Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2” and featured WAIK/WSIM, Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010.  We had a nice turn out and apart from my XP VM acting a bit funny at the end, all went well.  It was very much a demo, demo, demo session.

I recorded the webcast.  You can see the entire thing, unedited, right here.  It will be available for 365 days from now.

Thanks again to the folks at Microsoft Ireland for organising the venue and for helping to spread the word and thanks too to all who came along or tuned in live.