Superb weather, a challenging track, a professional organization and some entertaining people. Bottom line; I had a good time. Especially as it has been some time since I rode such a distance (did 100K). My climbing skills need some (a lot actually) but that hardly comes as a surprise.

Alternatively you can peak at some individual images in this gallery (in the correct order):

Great article

but I’m not sure I agree. From my point of view the article reveals nothing that isn’t known for months. Exchange 2010 is RTM for half a year already. What I really would like to see (and so are others) is a detailed comparison between both Enterprise Vault and Exchange Server. So far I’ve not been able to find such a comparison anywhere on the public internet, so let me have a shot at it myself:

Note: This info is preliminary. Both products are in need for E2K10 SP1 before they can be taken seriously. Enterprise Vault 9 is still in beta at the moment and will only support E2010 from SP1 onwards. Exchange Server 2010 will allow separating primary and secondary mailboxes starting with SP1. This highly anticipated Service Pack will probably be released somewhere around Q3 of this year.

Apart from that I’m convinced we’re actually seeing the trusted Microsoft strategy of entering the market with a basic feature set. They feel the temperature and then gain market share gradually. Release after release.

Whether you agree or not, or just want to contribute to the discussion; feel free to comment.

I experimented with commenting out each line on its own:

#header
#
#help

or using comment blocks

<#
header
help
#>

even

<#
header
#>
<#
help
#>

and a couple more variations, but no joy. After some “binging” I ended up reading about_Comment_Based_Help;

All of the lines in a comment-based Help topic must be contiguous. If a comment-based Help topic follows a comment that is not part of the Help topic, there must be at least one blank line between the last non-Help comment line and the beginning of the comment-based Help.

It still took some more trial and error to realize that an “empty line” well, needs to be really empty. It cannot contain a comment character either! Call me stupid ;-)

Here’s an example of how it should be done (Ref. line 22):

#========================================================================================================
# AUTHOR
# Koen Vermoesen
# ***.***@***.***
# 2010-05-20
#========================================================================================================
# SCRIPT
# Create custom address lists based on a CSV file
#========================================================================================================
# PREREQUISITES
# /
#========================================================================================================
# CHANGE HISTORY:
# 2010-05-10 Initial version
#========================================================================================================
# TO DO
# /
#========================================================================================================
# COMMENTS
# Parent lists need to proceed child lists in your input csv-file!
#========================================================================================================

#.SYNOPSIS
#Create custom address lists
#
#.DESCRIPTION
#Create custom address lists based on a CSV file called "CreateAddressLists.csv" with these columns
# - Name
# - Container
# - RecipientFilter
#The script will check if the "Container"-field is empty and run de cmdlet with or without "-container" option
#
#.Link
#http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996912.aspx

$Input = "CreateAddressLists.csv"
Import-CSV $Input | Foreach { If ($_.Container -eq "") {New-AddressList -Name $_.Name -RecipientFilter $_.RecipientFilter} else {New-AddressList -Name $_.Name -Container $_.Container -RecipientFilter $_.RecipientFilter}}

For those of you wondering, I have the habit of using scripts not just for bulky or repetitive actions but also as means of documentation and standardization. Additionally these scripts come in handy If you ever need to rebuild some part of the infrastructure. Hence the 35 lines of comment for only 2 lines of code.

There wasn’t any session that closely matched my core business. In the end I selected one solely based on the speaker:

Meet WAIK 2.0 and Volume Activation 2.0 (Rhonda Layfield)

I’m not very familiar with workstation deployment processes but Rhonda tried to change that. She covered most of the tools provided by MS in their Windows AIK (Automated Installation Kit):

• WinPE
• WPEUtil
• ImageX
• DISM: service images offline
• WSIM: deploying the image
• USMT

Breakout: NetApp

Too much background noise. Marketing.

Direct Access Part 1 (John Craddock)

Well, what can I say. I certainly didn’t expected a IPv6 “deep dive” (relatively speaking). IT was kind of fun nonetheless.

Moving to Exchange 2010 (Scott Schnoll)

Implementing Exchange 2010 will be the thing I’ll be putting in practice in the near future. So I chose this session over Direct Access part II. There wasn’t anything terribly new but certainly a nice review.

Introduction to OCS 14 (Francois Doremieux)

The interest in this session was a bit underestimated apparently as people had to sit on the stairs. The presenter expected a more developer oriented audience to apparently. There came no reaction at all when the speaker asked:

Who’s a developer? Please raise your hand.

There were some demo’s of the newest communicator but I guess there’s I can think of to remember.

Breakout: Social Networking with SharePoint (Mike Martin)

A “concullega” at my current assignment did a little presentation on a social networking solution they build on top op SharePoint. He had a hard time competing with the Public Address (PA) system in the exhibition hall.

Planning and Deploying VDI (Corey Hynes)

The key message Corey tried to pass was to check make sure your needs cannot be covered by ordinary Remote Desktop Services (RDS) rather than jumping to VDI.

The level of the presentation was just about right for me. We’re nearing the end of the conference after all.

A true geek moment when Cory showed off a youtube video he shot on Citrix Provisioning Server:

New voice capabilities and infrastructure in OCS 14(Francois Doremieux)

W14 was only announced last week @ voicecon? I had the impression the speakers was avoiding a number of subjects he could not discus yet. Important to remember:

• Survivable Branch Appliances
• PowerShell support

That’s it for this year

Here’s a shortlist of the items touched upon:

KeyNote: IT in a Transformative Time

You can watch see this KeyNote @ TechNet Edge.

Arlindo Alves

First of all Arlindo Alves makes some publicity for this own shop and introduces the material available for it pro’s:

• New TechNet website
• Communities etc…

Luc Van De Velde

Next we’re being introduced to the NUI (Natural User Interface e.g. voice) as oppose to the GUI.

Via the 1pad, a HP Compaq TC100 slate pc introduced in 2003, we end up in a discussion about the W7 acceptance rates.

You can’t go anywhere without hearing about “the cloud”; so on premise, private and public clouds lead us to the Azure.

Tony Krijnen, Daniel van Soest & Arlindo Alves

Arlindo called in his colleagues from the Netherlands for some help with a couple of demos:

• W7 deployment demo: manual vs. using the deployment toolkit
• Outlook 2010, Outlook Web App
• Windows phone 7
• Direct access: Especially the search connectors, which offer you an integrated search experience, looked interesting.
• Network Access Protection (NAP)
• Some Hyper-V stuff

Followed by a little Exchange Server demo to end the party.

Managing W2K8R2 and W7 with PowerShell V2 (Corey Hynes)

I still remember Corey from his presentation from last year. It’s one of those guys that give you the feeling they could talk for hours.

He quickly explains why you would want to use PowerShell for your management tasks. After quickly touching upon Sapien PrimalForms and the Core Configurator we look into one to one remoting, what are the differences between

invoke-command

and

new-pssession

and how can these be combined with the PowerShell modules available on a system:

• TroubleshootingPack
• ActiveDirectory
• ServerManager
• GroupPolicy

The next step is one-to-many remoting which can either be done by specifying multiple computer names separated by comma for the “-computer” parameter of looping through a input list or the results of an AD-query using a foreach statement.

Chalk Talk

We popped into a Chalk Talk session from the community after a quick sandwich. The part we attended to mainly covered cloud computing.

What’s W2K8R2 gone do for your AD (John Craddock)

John resorts to the start-demo script powershell script to show off some of the new ad cmdlets. We get to look at the AD Admin Center and the AD Best Practice Analyzer.

The remaining improvements brought to us by Windows Server 2008 R2 are

• AD Admin Center
• AD Best Practice Analyzer
• Managed Service Accounts
• Offline Domain Join
• Authentication Mechanism Assurance: higher (or lower) permissions depending on your method of authentication
• AD Recycle Bin

Building your virtualization infra in a ideal world (Kurt Roggen)

The first presentation of the afternoon is always seems the hardest to stay focused on. In this case it felt like a wall of sound was coming down on me. I had to make an effort to filter the message out of it.

Content wise we discussed the hardware features to pay attention to in a Hyper-V deployment. Guess most of it also applies when using any other Hypervisor.

Recovery of AD deleted objects and W2K8R2 Recycle Bin (John Craddock)

Wake up call! John starts with dumping and AD database and opening it with notepad. He goes on with deleting and restoring a user object in AD only to show us the problem with linked attributes:

• “Manager” vs. “Direct Reports”
• “Membership” vs. “MemberOff” In the process he reaches for a couple of tools to provide us with a couple of different views:
• LDF
• Sysinternals ADRestore
• REPAdmin Requirements for implementing the AD Recycle Bin introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Managing your identities with ForeFront Identity Manager 2010 (Jorge De Almeida Pinto)

Never had the chance to work with this type of solutions myself but as an administrator who typically has to keep track of rather large number of accounts in different systems I certainly see a number of interesting use cases in it.

Using this kind of technology for syncing GALs for instance. Or having a consolidated workflow which tackles the process of generating the accounts in different forests, incident management tools, access badges etc etc…

The sessions in the IT Pro-track focused on Exchange Server 2010 exclusively and are presented by Ilse Van Criekinge and Scott Schnoll. Here’s the stuff that I found most interesting:

Managing Exchange 2010

I was waiting in front of the wrong“Room 2” together with a lot of the other attendees. So  Ilse had already started with her first session concentrating on the new and improved management features of Exchange Server 2010.

We had an internal presentation last week were most of the stuff was covered, she did mention a couple details that we didn’t mention explicitly:

Exchange Control Panel (ECP)

Remote Shell:

During a internal presentation the question was specifically raised whether it would be possible to use remote PowerShell from a x86 workstation given that the Exchange binaries are only available in 64bit versions. I don’t exactly remember who came up with that one, but it is possible.

Exchange Management Console (EMC)

There were 3 things that i didn’t explicitly mentioned:

Exchange High Availability

Scott starts with outlining the HA goals and vision for E2K10, then covers the evolution of the HA options in the history of Exchange Server.

Key takeaways in this session:

• Datacenter level events (switchovers) always require manual action (we had an animated discussion)
• GUI for DAG defaults to DHCP. If you prefer fixed IP-addresses you need to use EMS. Multiple ip’s for different subnets can be separated by a comma.
• Larger DAG = greater resilience. Don’t be afraid to go big.

We shortly touched the topic of transitioning to E2K10 but a dedicated presentation will follow on day 2 of the main conference.

Exchange Information Protection & Control (incl. RBAC)

These features might not be used very frequently in the deployments we see, it’s always good to know what’s possible:

Intro

The goal is to protect your organisation against information leakage and at the same time provide a balance between soft & hard controls.

MailTips

Mailtips have partial offline support via the Offline Address Book (OAB)! Group metrics, on the other hand are gathered overnight and cached.

Given the difficult political situation in Belgium it was not to hard to relate to the demo about mailtips in different languages.

Transport Rules

Ilse showed off Dynamic Signatures. Trying to get end users to standardize e-mail signatures is an eternal battle for every organization. I wonder is exchange administrators will be tasked manage convincing marketing and/or communications departments to not overdo it!?

Moderation

Set E2K10 server as expansion server when using moderation in a mixed environment.

We ended with a discussion and demo of Information Rights Management (IRM) and ethical wall.

Exchange 2010 Client Side

What’s new when talking about client access/Web services

• Multi browser support
• Outlook-on-the-middle-tier: all outlook clients connect to CAS also 2K3 etc. Provides a better end user experience during *overs, but not a 100%. CAS-array keeps the CAS server from becoming a single point of failure.
• Outlook Web App (OWA): suggested contacts replaces NK2 nickname cache. Multiple mailboxes easily accessible.
• Exchange Active Sync (EAS)
• AutoDiscover

UM: not covered because of time constraints. Ilse promised a blog about it.

Exchange Performance/Scalability

This presentation was less a “what’s new”-type of presentation and went a bit further into the technical details=

Product team scalability & testing

• Scale up vs. scale out; msx team recommends scaling out
• Disable hyperthreading bacause it monitoring & capacity planning challenges

Guidelines & Ratios

• CPU: more cores result in reduced gains because of the overhead associated with it
• Memory; too much memroy won’t hurt but does cost money
• mailbox scalability for HA; size for double failure
• network load balancing; RPC required! Not just http

Toolkit for planning

• LoadGen
• JetStress
• Requirements Calculator
• Profile Analyzer

My netbooks battery status at the end of the day was still 48% so I actually had a good experience with digital note-taking.

You can compile your own agenda here. The tools allows you to actually mark the sessions of your interest and then hide all the others:

I will obviously focus on Exchange Server related sessions and fill the blanks with some other stuff that carries my interest:

On top of that there are also a couple of sessions organized by various user communities during the lunch breaks. I might attend one or the other too:

I have the intent to blog about this event like I did last year. I’m thinking of bringing my netbook with me. It would be nice not having to type over my paper notes and save some time.

The number of subfilters exceeds maximum allowed number of 100. Processing stopped.

Apparently an e-mail address policy cannot contain more than 100 address templates. Read on for more details: Watch those recipient Policies!!!

Note: an individual recipient cannot have more than 100 e-mail addresses either.

Anyway I defined my needs as:

• PDF support. PDF is, in theorie, more a standard for print then a true ebook format but a lot of technical books come in this format.
• Not tied to a specific reseller; meaning Kindle, Nook and the likes are “No Go”.
• Ability to sideload most of the content. I don’t intent to buy a lot of novels online. I want to read technical documents or use services like Instapaper to generate ebooks from online content.
• Don’t cost an arm and a leg. I’ve never actually used such a gadget so there’s always a risk that I end end up not liking the technology.
• I consider WIFI,  Touchscreen and other features as nice to haves. I don’t absolutely need them.

I ended up buying a Foxit Eslick. It’s not the latest and greatest but it does what I want it to do (without a lot of bells and whistles) and is one of the cheapest ereaders on the market.

Here are some unboxing photos:

Next step is loading some content on the unit.

CU

@Thys, @OrangeCrash;
Have fun & good luck.