We were in early to set up for a student only event where Wilbour Craddock (MS) did a mixture of Windows 7 and and home session.\u00a0 Once the prizes came out the kids started asking questions.\u00a0 It was pizza for lunch followed by our business launch event.\u00a0 That seemed to go well.\u00a0 The MS guys had set up the server infrastructure in a test room and accessed it via VPN.\u00a0 That simplified the move and setup.\u00a0 My deployment lab is a simple setup now.\u00a0 In the evening (after a trip to Subway) we had the IT @ home event by Wilbour.\u00a0 That was very interactive and I got involved a little when deployment questions came up.\u00a0 We left the gear in a secure room for the night to collect it in the morning.<\/p>\n
Back at the hotel bar we had a few drinks and discussed the feedback forms.\u00a0 I felt drained.\u00a0 The room we did the events in was very hot with no fresh air.\u00a0 That came up in the feedback.\u00a0 25% of the forms complained about the acoustics.\u00a0 I\u2019d agree with that: there was a bad echo that the speakers couldn\u2019t overcome.\u00a0 And the screens were also a bit low.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday we collected the gear and returned south to Dublin where we would be using a room provided by DIT Kevin Street.\u00a0 Myself and Dave enlisted the help of the student volunteers to get stuff moved onto the stage.\u00a0 This room looked good.\u00a0 Big stage and good acoustics.\u00a0 It allowed for 350 seats too.\u00a0 We were set up in no time.\u00a0 The AV company set up two HUGE screens nice and high up.\u00a0 Back at the hotel we discussed ideas.\u00a0 One of them was to use a webcam during Will\u2019s \u201ctouch\u201d demo to show his hands on the screen of his laptop manipulating the demo application. <\/p>\n
An early start for us in the college for the student event on Thursday.\u00a0 Lots of interaction \u2013 it mainly became a Q&A session with some of the kids really impressing the MS folks.\u00a0 The afternoon session kicked off.<\/p>\n There was a huge amount of moaning and complaining on boards.ie about tickets for these events.\u00a0 Usually at a tech event there is about 50% of registrants who don\u2019t turn up.\u00a0 With a launch that\u2019s lower and a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate should lower it again.\u00a0 MS overbooked the room to allow for people not turning up.\u00a0 Only 265 people turned up out of around 430 confirmed registrants.\u00a0 The room had 350 seats.\u00a0 Nuff said.<\/p>\n The afternoon session went fairly well.\u00a0 We were being recorded on video cameras for this one.\u00a0 The AV guys did an awesome job.\u00a0 Everything was slick.\u00a0 The demo\u2019s went well.\u00a0 We celebrated by having dinner in Eddie Rockets \u2026 chilli dogs and chilli fries do a stomach good after a week of eating burgers \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n The evening \u201cat home\u201d session was weird.\u00a0 One moany guy dominated proceedings, complaining that there aren\u2019t enough number keys on his keyboard and not understanding that you can\u2019t plug 3G gaming graphics cards into a virtual machine.\u00a0 Dumb ass!\u00a0 By the end of this session we were all entirely shattered.\u00a0 14 hours on the go can really drain you.\u00a0 We had one very quiet drink in the hotel bar before slinking back to our rooms.<\/p>\n Friday morning was a stripped down business launch session with just myself, Dave and Will.\u00a0 We had 2 hours to do what needed 2 and a half hours.\u00a0 A good number of the registrants turned up which was great.\u00a0 This session was added to deal with the demand for the previous day\u2019s business session.\u00a0 Apart from one little Internet issue this was our best session by far.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t have a coffee break and it just flowed.\u00a0 Everything fell into place nicely and we didn\u2019t miss anything.\u00a0 We managed to wrap up on time.\u00a0 We then had 30 minutes to clear the venue because the college had another event on.\u00a0 40 minutes later I was back in MS picking up my car and on the way back to the house.<\/p>\n I\u2019m totally exhausted now.\u00a0 I\u2019ve done a few bits of work and send some mails that had to be sent.\u00a0 Hopefully those of you who were there over the last few weeks enjoyed the sessions and learned something useful.\u00a0 I enjoyed demo-ing MAP, the application compatibility toolkit, XP Mode, Microsoft Security Essentials, BitLocker-To-Go and MDT 2010 to deploy and operating system.\u00a0 Thanks to the folks in MS for allowing me to join in on the tour and thanks to those of you who came along!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve just arrived home and had lunch after an exhausting week, doing the MS Ireland community launch events for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in Belfast and Dublin. On Monday I met up with Dave Northey in Microsoft, parked my car and picked up our demo kit.\u00a0 Dave drove us up to Belfast … Continue reading “Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Launch Events Complete \u2013 AKA the 7 Stone Tour”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"IMG_2661\"](\"https:\/\/trzlqg.blu.livefilestore.com\/y1mFxWS6sON7C0CRPi8k8yHYe8BlBolNCymXktzgK-ZD5HDvPxg2XBj6UHU9qFCf8Q2g7q36ASFIgGsfUfy4YdFHO4i6XbYgD_F0Wvjq-pIecJD4vR3sUZga-XI_Umsbwve1lK4hPDtKofAqa5Zaqsqlw\/IMG_2661[3].jpg\" "\\"IMG_2661\\"")
<\/a> <\/p>\n