My Tech-ed India 2009 experience

I attended Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009, Hyderabad from Mar-13th to 15th and it’s really great experience to be there with elite group of IT professional who are highly technical. Out of this three days program I attended last two days sessions completely and I am also there for Steve Ballmer’s (CEO of Microsoft Corporation) key note happened on day one.

May 13th….

My excitement to attend tech-ed made me to get out of bed early which is not my daily routine. In fact my mom got surprised :-). I reached the venue (HICC) by 9:30AM to complete registration formalities. In few minutes, I entered the tech-ed area which is already filled with people who are introducing each other. I waited for Chandu(my friend + X-colleague + colleague) to join me and we both made to the key note area and sat in a row from where we can clearly see the people on stage. In few minutes Steve entered the stage with a big round of applaud from all audiences and I really felt happy to see such a great business giant in real. He is like any other person for looks but not for thoughts. He started giving presentation on road map of Microsoft and upcoming releases with few jokes in between to gain peoples attention. I got completely involved in his presentation as I curious to see what Microsoft is cooking in their kitchen. In his presentation, he mentioned that innovation in any field is indirectly linked with innovation in IT(Information Technology). So, the world should say “MORE IT” not “NO IT”. After the presentation, the floor is opened for Q/A session. Many people in the room are ready to shoot some or the other question to Steve but only few got chance who reached the Q/A mike very early. And don’t ask me what questions they asked and Steve’s answers. They(the questions) appeared some kind of crap to me…or I should say, questions are valid but people asked wrong person. What he can comment on future versions of Silver light and other Microsoft products. However, I want to share two questions with you. One is humor involved and another is really worth asking him I feel. Q1: “What is that Microsoft learned from recession and what plans they made to get rid of it future ?”.Hmmm… Steve started answering this question with a smile on a his face. He said, no one can predict the recession when it can come and it is not limited to one organization. Recession comes once in life time(next recession is expected to happen in 21xx considering the previous pattern) and MS has no plans for it yet. He restated that considering the recession time, Microsoft is working on producing products at low cost again with all the latest features that customers are looking for. The Q2 is, “Steve never attended any Microsoft Tech-ed before, since it’s launch 17 years back and Why he made to India Tech-ed and Why to the one happening in Hyderabad?”. He answered that, It’s India tech-ed because, India is the country which has fast growth in no. of people who is studying computer science. It’s India because, Hyderabad has got Development center which is big after the one in Redmond. Wah..!! What a delightful statement that every Indian loves to hear.
After his 45 minutes session, I made to office to catch-up my daily tasks and chandu stayed back to continue for Windows 20008 sessions by Microsoft.

May 14th…

I started to attended technical session from this day and I have chosen “Unified Communication and collaboration” sub track under IT pro track.
Sessions highlights that I want to share with you are…

1. Introduction to Microsoft Exchange 2010
2. Exchange 2007 High availability and Disaster Recovery

Introduction to Exchange 2010 features:

As the title says it’s just a introduction session and below are the features in short that speaker covered

• Separate mailbox for archiving
• Searching across multiple mailboxes is possible
• You can configure IRM for mail items based on from/to addresses and based on content
• Mails tips to reduce the load on server; see http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/28/451193.aspx for more
• Now voice mails will have text preview
• IM through OWA provided you have LCS/OCS
• Easy filtering options in OWA and rich OWA interface is not limited to IE but also to Firefox, safari, chrome.
• Conversational views in OWA (like the way you see in forums)
• Customize voice mailbox message to give different messages to different people.
• Calendar sharing between two organizations
• Now you don’t need downtime for mailbox movement from from store to another
• Self service page in OWA which enables users to update certain fields like address, mobile, extn of their own
• Auto-group membership provisioning.

Exchange 2007 High availability and Disaster Recovery:
In this session they just re-iterated the points which most of the IT pro family is already aware of. They talked about CCR, LCR, SCR and their usage. There is very huge amount of material for these in internet. One thing they covered in detail is about Transport Dumpster feature in Exchange 2007 HTS server. You can read more about this at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997963.aspx.

March 15th…

It is the last day of tech-ed. People geared to get most out of the event by participating many events conducted over there.
The day started with Exchange Online and hosted services. This is a new concept which I heard from Microsoft but very early realized that giants like Google are already into this kind of market. The idea of Exchange online is simple, they provide antivirus, anti-spam and Quarantine facilities for enterprises. If a organization wants to out source these services, then they can choose Microsoft as their vendor. The organization has to point their MX records to Microsoft servers and Microsoft will relay these mails to your exchange servers after anti-virus, anti-spam scans. They have Quarantine facility with enterprise/user level black list and white list.
Microsoft Online services is a bit different from Hosted services. In online services Microsoft will host your mailbox, IM, and share point sites in their cloud(a.k.a datacenters) and end users can connect to them using a single sign on client. If the end user have a PC, they can download single sign on client and the client will automatically configure user outlook and office communicator for usage. If any one is interested at Online services, get a trail account from http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-online.mspx
Apart from Exchange stuff, I attended two more sessions. One is about OCS VOIP features and another about Office Live meeting. They are just normal and didn’t come across much interesting features except few internal which are useful for Network/OCS administrators.
With this I completed technical sessions at Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009.
Apart from technical stuff, I had lot off fun at the stalls kept in the tech-ed area. Especially, I enjoyed the games played in X-box 360. They kept for display/sales and delegates are allowed to play them. I spent most of my free time playing games there :-). Other stalls at Tech-ed are, Microsoft learning center where we can get certified for free of cost. Counter are available to test your applications on windows 7 and to see various features of it.

Few things I liked at tech-ed….

• Microsoft Learning center where we have access to lot of books
• Windows 7 experience and application compatability testing
• Microsoft Surface
• Microsoft Sam (a robot which can be programmed using Visual Studio)
• Polycom CX5000 video collaboration device

Photo gallery follows…

Steve Ballmer at Tech-ed India 2009

Sitaram Pamarthi(me) with formula-1 car by KingFisher kept for display at Tech-ed area

Microsoft Sam roaming around in tech-ed area

Microsoft Sam roaming around in tech-ed area(Video)

Thanks for reading long story 🙂 and I welcome your comments.
Sitaram Pamarthi